Sunday, February 6, 2011

Lost in a Nutshell

Spoiler alert, in case you haven't guessed.

Tonight I was bored and decided to write an entire summary of the Lost series, so here it is:


Jack's green eyes flashed open immediately, his pupils retracting to compensate for the sudden onslaught of light.


He was laying on his back in the midst of a bamboo field. He didn't know exactly how he got here; the last thing he remembered was... What had happened? Oh. Right. The plane had split in half and crashed in a burning heap to the ground.


Plane? Crashed? Burning? Ground? The words sluggishly muddled their way around Jack's mind, ricocheting off the walls of his brain and eventually breaking through the stupor into his conscious mind. People must be seriously hurt, or dead, he eventually concluded. After convincing his muscles to work with his brain, he managed to stand up and registered some large degree of pain in his upper back. With a herculean effort, he managed to ignore it and followed the sound of failing jet engines to a nearby beach.


On the beach was a sight of complete devastation. The plain lay in ruins, with dead and/or injured people strewn randomly along the pristine sand on the shore. Those who had managed to stand up were either screaming trying to locate their loved ones. Most lay in uncomfortable positions on the ground, blood seeping from multiple wounds.


Luckily, Jack was a doctor.


Not the kind of doctor who's good at all at everyday, general injuries. Jack was a spinal surgeon, and strictly a spinal surgeon. He really wasn't sure how to do anything else. By coincidence, there was one abandoned wheelchair lying, deserted, in the sand, and it belonged to a man named John. John was paralyzed from the waist down, but not from the plane crash, so Jack couldn't do anything to help him. John was also miraculously healed, and was standing, dumbfounded, on his feet some twenty yards behind Jack, but left to attend to his own business rather than have a chat with him about performing some spinal surgery.


Jack decided to act like he knew what he was doing and grabbed some alcohol from the plane's beverage tray, which happened to be laying nearby. He set to the task of trying his best to pull as many injured people from the plane crash as he could, and the less injured of these people gathered belongings from the plane's luggage compartment to set up a sort of makeshift camp. The more able-bodied of the survivors helped Jack to salvage the most people.


This act spawned a series of many other countless, and some rather unfortunate events that wove a deep and complicated web through the fabric of time and space, involving lots of time-travel, alternate universes, and a polar bear (all on this magical and mysterious island).


Jack met a nice girl named Kate, who (though she had never sewn in her life) managed to stitch up the cut along Jack's shoulder blade. Jack and Kate formed a love triangle with a bada** con-man who had assumed the identity of the man who killed his parents, Sawyer. Sawyer later fell in love with a girl named Juliet, who belonged to a group called The Others that had previously lived on the island and descended from a group called the Dharma Initiative, which we will get into later. By coincidence, Jack married Juliet, had an attractive son named David, and then divorced her, all in an alternate universe.


John Locke, the paralyzed and miraculously healed man, teamed up with a man named Boone Carlisle to try and open a hatch they had found in the jungle one day. Boone died while searching a small plane they had found trapped in a tree one day.

Boone had a stepsister named Shannon, who he actually kind of loved in his own, semi-incest way. Shannon fell in love with a man named Sayid (a torturer from Iraq who lost the love of his life when she was captured) on the island, but was shortly killed by a crazy French woman named Danielle.


On the hatch that John found, there were some numbers: 4 8 15 16 23 42. These numbers were coincidentally played by a fat man named Hurley in the lottery, which he won. This caused him to have chronic bad luck and made a meteor crash into one of the buildings of his later-started chicken franchise.


Inside the plane that Boone died exploring were some statues filled with heroin, which Charlie Pace was addicted to. Charlie was a musician in an British band called DriveShaft. Charlie unfortunately died one day while searching an underwater stronghold (belonging to The Others) called the looking glass for a man named Desmond's love's boat.


Charlie was in love with a sweet, Australian girl named Claire who was pregnant at the time of the crash. She eventually had a beautiful little boy named Aaron, whom she was told to raise by herself by a slightly eccentric fortune teller back home after her previous boyfriend left her.


Desmond, whom Charlie was helping out when he happened to die, was the man that John Locke found living in the hatch with the numbers on it. He had to press a button every 108 minutes to stop a large magnetic explosion from taking place, but he slept in one day and caused a magnetic anomaly that caused Oceanic Flight 817 to crash in the first place and therefore set off this entire chain of events.


Desmond's love was Penny, the daughter of a man named Charles Widmoore, who had been to the island and hated the current leader of The Others, Benjamin Linus.


Ben was the man who had stolen Danielle's daughter Alex and caused her to become crazy. Alex was killed at the hands of Charles Widmoore's men when Ben refused to negotiate with them.


Ben is advised by an immortal man named Richard who never ages and came to the island long ago on a ship called the Black Rock as a servant, to work off his punishment for killing a doctor to get medicine for his sick wife Isabella, who eventually died anyway.


Among others, some more survivors included Sun and Jin (a lovely Korean couple who just couldn't seem to stay together) and Rose and Bernard (Two old lovers who settled down somewhere in the midst of all the time-traveling to live a simplistic lifestyle in the jungle).


Eventually, Daniel Faraday comes to the island in a rescue attempt, supposedly from Penny's boat but also apparently not from Penny's boat. Daniel helps the survivors return to their normal lives by blowing up a hydrogen bomb in the midst of a magnetic anomaly in 1967 when they have traveled back in time in order to prevent the anomaly that crashed their plane, but it subsequently ends up also causing the very same anomaly and creating a paradox-universe at the same time where all of the same characters are related in different ways, but find out that they're really all dead and have been in purgatory this whole time.


This whole charade is watched, amusedly, by two characters known as “Jacob” and “The Man in Black”.


These two represent good and evil, respectively. Jacob has all sorts of cool powers and made Richard immortal. Man in Black can turn into a giant, evil smoke monster who takes the form of John Locke when he returns to the island (after escaping and then hanging himself, but returning in a coffin thanks to Jack). Jacob calls people to the island to show the Man in Black that not all people are evil by nature, but his efforts seem to have a somewhat counter-effective product.


Jacob is eventually killed by John Locke From the Dead/Man in Black with the help of Ben (who had been taking orders received from Richard, from Jacob whom he'd never seen or met and was feeling rather neglected). Hurley, who can see dead people, talked to Jacob after he was killed. Jacob needed a replacement to run the island and keep the Man in Black from speading his evil ways to the world, so in a dramatic and rather confusing series of events, Frank Lapidus (who was originally supposed to fly flight 817 but had a cold that day and who also somehow appeared on the island in a second plane crash) flew everyone off the island except Jack (who died after a dramatic fight with the Man in Black), Hurley (who became the new Jacob), and Ben (who became Hurley's advisor).


In the alternate universe, the survivors of flight 817 gathered in a church with their memories restored (They had lost them but Desmond, Charlie, and Faraday helped restore them) and happily followed Jack's dead father Christian into a bright light that may or may not have been the afterlife.


Somehow, a polar bear was involved.