New Links and New Lost

First off, here's a new MVN post, and here's the Laker-centric version of my mid-season awards.

Now, some bonus thoughts about the Lost season premiere!

Past season premiers of Lost have raised more questions then they've answered, but created a sense of awe that made up for it-witness last season's premiere, where we got a shot of a suburban community and then saw that it was Actually on the Island!

However, as the show's writers had chosen to do that with last season's crazy twist finale, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that this premiere chose to give us some ideas about what was going on instead of blow our minds.

This was the first premiere when we didn't get a Jack "flashback" (again, they did that in last year's finale), although he was, again, the first person we saw in a flashback/flash-forward.

Anyways, we can now put some things together:

-First and most importantly, only 6 people left the island, leaving Hurley and Jack with extreme guilt, which they deal with by going insane; Jack goes old-school self loathing and immerses himself in alcohol and facial hair while Hurley actually goes back to the mental hospital. So far, all three characters have dealt with their feelings of guilt as we'd have expected them to-Jack gets proactive and tries to fix everything himself by flying back and forth over the island and becomes increasingly despondent as he realizes he can't fix the problem, Hurley retreats back into safety and comfort, and Kate changes her appearance and runs away from her guilt. This new revelation also helps to square Jack's flash-forward from last season with his status as a hero; while certain aspects of his character, particularly the ones from his flashback during last season's premiere, would have suggested that his misery was due to his obsessive nature and he was obsessed with returning to the island, where he was king, just like he was obsessed with the idea of returning to his wife, it now looks like Jack is miserable because he's a hero after all and is racked with guilt over abandoning 31 people on the island.

-While Jack is starting to look like a hero again, Sawyer moved back to being a bad guy, leaving Kate behind in order to go with Locke and self-preservation. As one of the main reasons that most of us (well, me, anyways) have come to see Sawyer as the show's true hero is because of his deeply-hidden romantic nature and the fact that he really does love Kate deep down, I was not a big fan of this call-it sets up a Jack-Sawyer-Kate triangle again and keeps the "big four" balanced between the two teams, and may ultimately mean that the show's two main male leads end up balanced between being on and off the island, (although if Sawyer isn't the "he" Kate referred to in the finale last year, who would it be? My dark-horse call would be that she got pregnant with Sawyer's kid, just like Cassie, although for him to be old enough to "wonder where someone is," he'd have to be at least two or three, and even that's a little young to be left home alone, and years seems like too much time to me.) it reflected horribly on Sawyer's character, and Sawyer's slow-burn emergence as a hero on the show is one of the best things about Lost. (Although the move was set up in flashback when Sawyer had to give up the mother of his child in order to bail himself out of debt, I still didn't like it.)

-It looks like we'll find out what the guys on the boat really want next week. I'm excited.