Get LOST

I’m befuddled. I like to tell myself this show is ultimately about its individual characters and their moral/ethical quandaries, which is largely responsible for my loyal viewership, but I’m just as often scratching my head and wondering what the hell’s going on as the next guy. Through a certain light, however, it's almost like the time travel, the mystical island, and now the parallel realities are just unique backdrops for character driven story telling. At least this is what I tell myself when my confusion almost becomes frustration. What’s compelling now with this new flash sideways wrinkle is we're able to see what these characters may have done and become if the plane had never crashed.

• Fake Locke brandishes at least two knives when he's in the giant foot with Ben after kicking Jacob into the fire.... In the flash sideways Locke's knives never arrive at LAX in 2007!
• Not everything is the same in this alternate 2004 without the crash. Michael, Walt & Vincent weren't on the plane. Hurley’s happy and considers himself the luckiest man on earth instead of cursed, Desmond’s on board for some reason, during the turbulence Jack is reassured by Rose and not the other way around as it happened originally when the plane crashed. Boone couldn't convince Shannon to leave Australia.
• Where is Jack's father, Christian? Maybe on board the wrong plane that ends up crashing on the island with all those new others on it? I don’t know.
• I think Desmond knows more than he appeared to have let on in his brief interaction with Jack.
• The mirky water wasn’t clean, as they said. Sayid is now Jacob. The island's headed for war.
• Jacob and Fake Locke? No clue. One guy seems to espouse the idea that people make things bad while the other thinks they’re inherently good… but Jacob has blood all over his hands.
• One of the new 'others' was the stewardess on the plane that gave jack the vodka… the others we’ve only seen on the island. Presumably the timelines converge at some point and/or the new others arrive on the island between 2004 and 2007? Maybe another plane crashes? Where did those other people come from? They seem pretty settled.
• They showed the island under water when they fly over it in the “crash never happened” scenario. WTF?
• Weren’t there cars in trees on the island in past seasons? Or something that shouldn't have been in a tree? Or something that suggested the island had been under water?