Nov 15 2008
Why did the LOSTies get on Flight 815? (and new Season 5 promo)
What hooked me most on the show during the first season was the way that characters kept on showing up in each other’s flashbacks. Here was a seemingly random collection of people and, bit by bit, we were shown that their all being on the same doomed flight couldn’t have been as random as it seemed.
What was it these people had in common? How many had crossed paths in the past? Why were they all on the island? Those were the questions that kept me coming back from the start, and that still have me hooked, more than four years later.
Of all the characters from Flight 815, Locke seems to be closest to knowing the answers. Here, in a significant moment in the Season 1 finale, he lectures a skeptical Jack:
LOCKE: … Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? You think we crashed on this place by coincidence? Especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason — all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.
JACK: Brought here. And who brought us here, John?
LOCKE: The island. The island brought us here. (Jack is having a difficult
time listening to this.) This is no ordinary place. You’ve seen that. I know
you have. The island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.
Now, as we are approach the start of Season 5, the show’s producers are teasing us with references to destiny. The first Season 5 promo used the word “destiny” twice, once spoken (a short bit clipped from the dialogue above) and once written. Now, there is a new mini-promo, only 15 seconds long, where “destiny” is featured even more prominently:
So (fingers crossed) the show will, in the end, reveal the mystery of the characters’ destiny – and once we know that, we should know who they really are and what brought them all together to walk through Sydney Airport’s Gate 23.
