(Adapted from a conversation with the lovely and curious Rachel Lusky…) The easiest way to explain is by a summary of each // the off-island people, and the on-island people.
On-island first.
Last season ends, a big flash happens, and they (Sawyer, Juliette, Charlotte, Faraday, Miles) realize the camp is gone. Faraday explains that they are jumping through time like a record skips.
While on the beach, flying flaming arrows attack them and kill a ton of the “extra characters”, so they all scatter.
Meanwhile, Locke is out in the jungle on his own going through the same flashes. During one, he meets Ethan who doesn’t know him, and who shoots him in the leg. During another, he meets up with Richard Alpert. Alpert tells Locke a few things: 1) You need to get off the island and convince everyone who left to come back, 2) You are going to have to die to do that, and 3) The next time you see me I won’t know you, so give me this compass.
After the beach folks scatter, Sawyer and Juliet run into several young men in old-style army uniforms with guns, while Faraday / Charlotte / Miles move on and are eventually captured by a group of similarly dressed young people led by a bratty young girl named “Ellie”.
The young army men are about to cut off Juliet’s hand, when Locke comes out of nowhere and throws a knife in one of the young men’s backs. One thing leads to another and everyone ends up back at a tent camp where Richard Alpert appears to be in charge.
Ellie takes Faraday off to help them disarm a huge Hydrogen bomb (code name Jughead) that they confiscated from the U.S. army (hence the army uniforms). Daniel seems to recognize Ellie from somewhere.
Meanwhile, Locke enters the camp and gives the compass back to Richard (who doesn’t recognize Locke at the time), telling him that Jacob told him to come. Locke and Richard have a discussion, and it turns out it’s 1954, so Locke tells Richard that he’s about to be born in CA the next year, he should go see (which is probably why Richard is in the hospital on the day of Locke’s birth, which we saw in an earlier season).
There is another big flash, and the camp disappears, and they all decide to head to the Orchid station so that Locke can get off the island and save them. They find a boat and decide to take it around to the other side of the island to save time. As they paddle, someone in a boat behind them begins to shoot at them. There is another flash, and it’s a big storm that forces them ashore.
Also caught in that storm is a raft full of French people, who come upon some wreckage with a body floating on it. They get to the body and it turns out to be Jin. His body was thrown from the freighter when it exploded, and he landed inside the island’s radius, so he’s been transported along through every flash.
The group of French sailors turns out to be… Danielle Rousseau and her crew, having just landed on the island sometime in the mid to late 80s we think. Jin stays with them for a while, until the smoke monster kills one of their crew, then drags another one of them down a hole.
Danielle’s crew goes in after him but Jin won’t let pregnant Danielle go down too. Then Jin disappears in another flash. He wanders for a while until he finds them again, near the shore.
It seems as though the smoke monster sort of… possessed… everyone who went down that hole, and they are being very strange, which apparently forces Danielle to kill them all, including her own baby-daddy (which is why she tells that story to Sayid in Season 1 episode Solitary).
There is another flash, and finally Jin reconnects with Sawyer and Locke and the gang on their way to the Orchid. As they continue on, Charlotte’s nose is bleeding a lot more with every flash, until she finally collapses. It doesn’t appear that she will make it any further. Faraday offers to stay back with her while the others keep heading to the Orchid.
Charlotte tells Faraday that she’s been on this island before — she was born there, and her mom took her away while she was young. Her mother always denied that any island existed, but Charlotte has been spending her whole life trying to find it again.
And then she also remembers there was a scary older man on the island, who scared her and told her “never come back to this island or you’ll DIE”. And she looks at Faraday and says “it was you!”
Then she dies.
Locke, Miles, Sawyer, Jin and Juliet continue on to the Orchid. When they arrive, Locke goes down a well to get down into the Orchid station and back to that “wheel” thing that Ben turned.
Jin makes him promise not to bring Sun back, and to tell her he’s dead, and he gives Locke his wedding ring and tells him to tell Sun that his body washed ashore, dead.
As Locke is descending, there is another flash, and he falls all the way down the well and breaks his leg. A very nasty break. While Locke is sitting on the ground in pain, around the corner comes Christian Shephard (Jack’s dad).
Christian tells him he needs to leave and bring everyone back. He also tells Locke that when he gets to L.A., he should find a woman named Eloise Hawking. So Locke gets up and finds the wheel, and he pushes it like Ben did, and disappears. Meanwhile Sawyer, Juliet, Jin, Miles, and Faraday are all above ground, stuck in whatever time they were in when Locke left.
THE END (for the on-island people, so far)
[... deep breath ...]
Now, for off-island :
The Oceanic 6 get back to the U.S., do their press conference where they lie to everyone, and then all go their separate ways. When Sayid’s wife is killed, Ben finds him and gets him to work for him, killing people (this all happened last season). Jack and Kate are dating for a while, but break up because the Aaron thing is so painful and weird.
3 years pass…
Jack is getting crazier and crazier, Hurley is in an asylum, Sayid stops working for Ben, Sun is pissed and finds Charles Widmore to help her kill Ben, we think, and Kate is living happily with Aaron.
Somewhere in Tunisia, Locke appears in the middle of the desert with a camera pointing at him, and a truck of Arabs pick him up and take him to a make-shift hospital to fix his horribly broken leg.
It’s the same place that Ben ended up last season when he turned that wheel.
At the hospital, Matthew Abbadon watches while they set Locke’s leg. Locke passes out and wakes up in a bed, where Charles Widmore is sitting next to him. Widmore guesses that Locke is off the island to get his friends to go back, and he asks Locke, “How long has it been, for you, since we first met in camp with Richard Alpert?”
Locke says “4 days” and Widmore says, “wow isn’t that amazing” because for Widmore it’s been… 50 years or so. It turns out that the camera on Locke in the desert is Widmore’s camera because that is “the exit,” Widmore explains.
Widmore tells Locke that he used to lead the “others” on the island, and that Ben tricked him off the island. Now, he cares deeply about what happens to that island, and about keeping Ben away from it.
He gives Locke some money and a file with info on all Oceanic 6, and tells him to find them all and get them to go back. Widmore’s colleague, Abbadon, will escort him wherever he wants to go. So Locke visits everyone, and everyone says “Hell no I’m not going back, crazy old Locke!”
Abbadon gets shot and Locke drives off in the car only to get in a bad accident, and he ends up in a hospital where… Jack is doctor. Locke tells Jack that “Your dad says hello” because Christian told Locke “Say hi to my son!” This freaks Jack out big time, who starts yelling and crying and storms out of the room.
So Locke goes back to his hotel, writes a note, puts it in an envelope in his pocket, and gets an extension cord out which he ties around a beam in the ceiling, puts around his neck, ties it, and is about to jump off the table to hang himself, when there’s a knock at the door.
Ben walks in – it turns out he shot Abbadon to protect Locke from Widmore. He tells Locke “You can’t kill yourself, you’re too special and you need to come back to the island with us because you have so much work to do.” Locke starts crying because he failed, he couldn’t get anyone to go back to the island, and he knows he has to die, so he’s dying on purpose like Richard told him he must.
Ben convinces him down, and finds out from Locke that Jin is still alive, and that Christian told him to find Mrs. Hawking. Ben admits that he knows this woman and suddenly, he grabs the extension cord and strangles Locke to death with it.
Jack sees the obituary in the paper (in the Season 3 finale) and again freaks out, calls Kate, and says his whole “WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!” line. So Ben finds Jack and convinces him they have to go back and they have to take Locke with them, in his casket, to the island.
Through a series of events (not necessary to go into great detail here), Ben/Jack/Sun end up meeting with this Eloise Hawking lady.
Two things about her
1) She’s Faraday’s mother, and most likely the girl with the gun (named “Ellie”) who captures Faraday back in 1954 during one of the flashes on the island.
2) We’ve met her before, in an episode during Season 3 when Desmond goes back in time the first time, and tries to buy a ring for Penny and a white-haired old lady tells him he can’t, because the rules of time don’t permit him to change anything.
So Mrs. Hawking explains to the group, in a church basement that turns out to be a Dharma station called “The Lamp Post”, that researchers figured out how to find out where the island WILL be, using complex formulas and a swinging pendulum. She has discovered that if they take a certain flight, it’s going to intersect with where the island will be, so they all need to be on it.
Then she calls jack back into her office alone.
She gives him the suicide note from Locke’s pocket (it was an envelope that says “Jack Shephard” on the front).
She then tells Jack that he needs to get something that belongs to his father, and put it on Locke for when they get on the plane. When Jack protests, she says “well, you can believe or not, but that’s why they call it a leap of faith.”
So Jack goes to visit his grandfather (Ray) in a retirement home, and finds a pair of his dad’s shoes, and ends up putting them on Locke even though he thinks it’s stupid.
At the airport, Jack shows up, Kate shows up, Sun shows up, and Hurley shows up (but we don’t know how he found out about it since he wasn’t at Mrs. Hawking’s), and Sayid shows up in handcuffs, with a female marshal leading him in.
They all get on the plane (Kate doesn’t have Aaron, and tells jack he can never ask about Aaron again if he wants Kate to come along) FYI: Kate told jack that the night before in jack’s apartment, and then they immediately had hot sex.
Just before the plane takes off, Ben gets aboard. After a few hours of flight, they discover the pilot is… Frank Lapidus — the helicopter pilot from the freighter.
Jack eventually takes the note out and decides to read it, and all it said was, “Jack, I wish you had believed me. Signed, John Locke.”
As they pass over the island, another flash happens, and Jack finds himself in the jungle on his back. He hears yelling and goes to find Hurley struggling in the lagoon, and Kate wakes up on the shore of the lagoon.
Those 3 get up and start to walk, and a Dharma van pulls up — a guy in a dharma jumpsuit gets out and points a gun at them… but it’s JIN.
Last but not least, we see the plane has sort of crash landed on the second, smaller island (where Ben was keeping Jack/Sawyer/Kate hostage back in Season 3, and where we first met Juliette).
We meet two new people — ILANA who is the marshal who had Sayid captive, and CAESAR who is a short Hispanic guy who seems extremely shady. ILANA finds CAESAR and tells him they found a man standing in the water who nobody recognizes from the plane, who is wearing a nice suit.
He goes out and finds… Locke… looking very alive.
Apparently, the pilot of the plane took off in one of the small boats with a woman and headed to “the other island”. Later, ILANA asks Locke who he is, what he remembers, and Locke says, “I remember dying.” He tells them he thinks he can help them figure out what’s going on, but he needs to find his friends first. ILANA tells him he’ll need to ask Caesar.
Caesar tells Locke that the pilot took the manifest with him, but everyone is accounted for except for “the people who were hurt”. When Locke asks about these people, Caesar takes him into a tent where there are about 10 or 15 people on blankets, some have a little blood in various areas, but they all look like they are asleep or in shock or something.
In the corner… is Ben.
Locke sees him and Caesar says, “Do you know this guy?” to which Locke answers, “Yeah… he killed me.”
Congratulations: now you’re caught up.
Filed under: Entertainment | Tagged: LOST, Lost: Season 5, Synopsis
