"Lost" Season 6 Episode Titles Online - What Do They Mean?

We're less than one week away from January 2010. Which means we're still one month (and less than one week) away from new episodes of "Lost." But IMDB has already posted episode titles for several episodes of Season 6. As far as I saw, no spoilers, other than the titles themselves, and my ensuing ruminations about what these episode titles might mean, below.

And the titles are: "LA X," "What Kate Does," [Episode 6.3 - which I guess means, "title to come"], "The Substitute," "Lighthouse," "Sundown," "Dr. Linus," "Recon," and "Ab Aeterno."

Here's where I become a crazy "Lost" fan, conjecturing about what some of those episodes might contain without even for sure knowing where the beginning of this season finds us. I love this stuff. I love that I know enough about the characters to make guesses as to what they'll do in a future or past I have no knowledge of, based solely on a word or two. I love imagining where these established characters will go, and will delight even if this season proves me wrong. It's like a textually minded person's dream. I've spent way too much time on this today, but I like to believe it helped clear my mind, so I can focus on work this week.

But if 2010's final episodes of "Lost" have me institutionalized and playing chess with Mr. Eko's ghost, we'll know it all started here. If you want to peek inside my crazed mind, my theories based on nothing but a few words begin after the jump.

Episode 1: LA X: As anyone who's flown into Los Angeles - or has been obsessed with a show about a plane that went missing on its way from Sydney to Los Angeles - knows, LAX is Los Angeles International Airport. Assuming that Juliet managed to set off Jughead and do a manual reboot of history, perhaps Oceanic 815 managed to successfully land in Los Angeles after all. 

Traditionally, the opening of pivotal seasons focuses on Jack, so it's reasonable to assume that this season will begin with Jack, perhaps when he opens his eyes (from a long airplane nap) to find he's landed in Los Angeles. However, there is a deliberate space between the LA and the X, which could mean one of several things. X can mean time, so LA-space-X can mean that they're back in LA, but there's a space in time. X meaning the Roman numeral ten, might indicate that another timelapse happened, perhaps with a variable of a decade, or it could be a reference to Jesus and rebirth (which speaks for the "manual reboot" theory).  But Farraday said, "What Happened, Happened." So perhaps, even with the reboot and a successful landing at LAX, there's some mental shellshock that reverberates for the "survivors." If the "Oceanic Six" go back to the plane before the crash, they might be "reinserted" into the timeline (and the plane) with changed consciousness. Do they see the other "survivors" at some point and have a strange sense of deja vu? Or does destiny want their lives to intersect, whether they're on or off the island?

Or, if "what happened" is Juliet setting off the bomb and resetting things, to what point on the timeline did it reset things? Do Kate and Sawyer meet up as kids and form another "Muppet Babies" episode of "Lost" (like we got when we met little Sayid and kid Ben in the same episode)? Will Hurley be credited as the writer on "Empire Strikes Back"? Does Locke become a corporate success and put Widmore out of business? Or does everything end up the same no matter who does what?

Even if we set the clock back to the time of Oceanic 815's landing in Los Angeles, Jacob has still encountered (and touched) Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Jin and Sun, and Hurley - what kind of impact does that have on this new scenario? One piece of information I did notice from the cast list is that Elizabeth Mitchell is still credited for this episode, so stands to reason that we'll get another glimpse at Juliet, at least for this episode.

Episode 2: What Kate Does: Let's see, what does Kate do? She runs. She confuses and deceives men (and sometimes blows them up or gets them killed). So I guess the question is, if the plane manages to land at LA "X" in the previous episode, then Kate would be taken to jail by the marshal - unless she runs and/or gets him killed, which is "what Kate does." Maybe she meets Sawyer on her way to the lockup and they launch a plan together to run. But then the title might reveal that, with a team/Bonnie and Clyde vibe, instead of a single-character focus. Just speculation. Oh, and Elizabeth Mitchell is gone from the episode cast list. Sorry, people.

Episode 3: No title listed. No cast listed. Come on, give me something to work with, people! Maybe this is the heavily guarded episode wherein Sawyer finds an endless supply of shirts. Or we find out what color eyeliner Richard Alpert uses. Either way, the fans are going to initially hate it, and then look back on it as pivotal character development.

Episode 4: The Substitute: Who is the Substitute? Perhaps it is the Adversary, who is the Substitute John Locke, or Ben Linus, who killed Jacob when Faux Locke could not. Or maybe the substitute is John Locke, who died so that Faux Locke could return. The truth is, the Ajira Air flight had a number of people who could be viewed as "substitutes" - Ilana instead of the marshal, dead John Locke instead of dead Christian Shephard, a guitar case instead of - or representing - Charlie. Who substituted for the in utero Aaron? Is Ilana or Kate pregnant? Or maybe the Substitute, for some currently unknown reason, is Frank Lapidus. And here's where we find out why...

Episodes 5 and 6: Lighthouse and Sundown: My guess, although the cast list doesn't support this, is that we'll see Desmond again in these episodes, at least in Lighthouse - with its sailing imagery and Desmond's history with racing the "Elizabeth" (Libby) boat to first get to the island, using a boat to try to leave the island several times, and now living on a boat with Penny and baby Charlie. It might be worth noting that "Lighthouse" might also refer to "The Lamp Post," the only Dharma station to be off the island (the one with the pendulum, in the basement of the church in Los Angeles, where the gang encounters Eloise Hawking). 

Although this may not have anything to do with the episode, I Googled "Lost Lighthouse" and found this story about a lighthouse that went missing in 1925 and was assumed to have been destroyed. But it just turned up near San Francisco - turns out the Coast Guard moved it and didn't tell anyone. By the way, I know baby Charlie is named for Driveshaft's Charlie, but Penny's father is Charles Widmore. If she hates him so much, why would she permit Desmond to name their son Charlie? True, "not Penny's boat" did provide a life-saving clue, but still, that always bugged me. As for "Sundown," it could refer to a passing of power or of life. We could lose a cast member this week. But then again, that can pretty much happen any time.

Episode 7: Dr. Linus: Ben's a doctor? Since when? My guess is an evil genius like Ben can feign any profession he wants to. Maybe he's the "doctor" who declared Christian Shephard dead in Australia. Maybe he acts as a doctor for the Others, and begins to mentor little Ethan Goodspeed (we've been told Ethan becomes a doctor - could this be his flashback/origins episode?) Or maybe Ben tries to reanimate Locke ("Dr. Frankenbenry"?) But it's possible that what we'll find out is that Ben's mother was a scientist - perhaps for this reason, it is Horace (yes, island-died-in-the-purge-Horace) that finds the Linuses as the dying Mrs. (or perhaps, Dr.?) Linus is giving birth to her son, Benjamin. I think this is my most creative idea so far.

Episode 8: Recon: Who's doing the recon? And is it reconnaissance, in the military sense, of scoping out an enemy/potential battle situation, or reconstruction, as in trying to rebuild some semblance of order on the island or off-island for the Oceanic Six or the relationship between Ben and Widmore? Will we see the process of the Others building the dossiers about the Oceanic crash survivors? Or is this an episode that flashes back to the Purge and explains how Ben built the hostiles into the Others.

Episode 9: Ab Aeterno: If the online cast list for this episode is correct, this episode features a scaled-down version of the regulars: Sayid, Richard, Lapidus, Sawyer, Jin, Sun, Kate and Locke. Whether this spells doom for other characters like Ben and Jack (or, more likely, this is just an error), we won't know until the season starts. But the episode title does mean "from the beginning of time." And if we go back to the beginning of time, before the Black Rock came to the island, back to when the statue was a full statue and not just a foot, we're back at the rivalry between Jacob and the Adversary. Perhaps what we get in this episode is the background on how Jacob and the Adversary came to the Island, and how the Ben/Widmore rivalry may have been orchestrated by the Adversary, in search of his loophole. But that theory doesn't match the cast list. So something's wrong. 

One thing's for sure. I can't wait until February 2, when "Lost" returns and, undoubtedly, blows my mind on a weekly basis (and until Doc Jensen returns with his weekly analyses - his level of commitment to exploring every detail is inspiring - and a little worrisome, but he's my hero). No pressure, though.

Comments

[shai]

Biggest disappointment of the season: No Juliet. How will they explain it? Either Jughead killed her and there was no reboot, or there was a reboot and Juliet remains an Other uninvolved in the lives of the 815ers.

Alternate theory: Recon refers to a re-con, that is, another con job. This could be a Sawyer reference, or, the O6 pulling another con job on the public.

Excitement: Much.

[Esther]

Juliet went to work for the FBI, to investigate alien visitors. Oh, wait ...

She will be in the first episode, and maybe more - she just won't be a series regular anymore. What happened, happened. I still think that Jack can't have been right about the reboot. They're playing with time here, like Farraday played by telling Desmond he was the constant and getting him involved in the time warp on another level of consciousness. I think that the 815ers are going to be reinserted into the original rebooted storyline, but with flashes of what happened to them, a different level of consciousness of what's going on around them and who people are. But I guess we'll see.

And good call on the re-con being a Sawyer episode. Although Locke was often the con-ee in his own life. So could be we'll see a melding of the two storylines there. But who knows???