Mr Lahey Discusses the New LOST Season

Mr Lahey spent approximately four hours watching LOST material Monday night - the three hours of the debut night broadcast included.

But later, our ABC affiliate local news (KATU...lahey lives in Portland, kids), ran an interview with Michael Emerson, who plays Benjamin Linus. Then, Nightline ran a pretty indepth piece on the show. Following that, the coup de gras was Jimmy Kimmel with the two co-producers on. That one contained the real golden tidbits, but interesting things were learned about LOST in the others as well.

It was past 12:30 a.m. before all the insider info stopped flowing - hence the four and a half hours.

LOST has special meaning in Portland, by the way. There are at least two references to P-town in the series, primarily Linus was born just outside of this town AND the mysterious biotech firm that scooped up Juliet to work on the island was purportedly located here.

Also, for us "coasties" (i also live part time in Manzanita, on the Oregon coast), there is a weird paranormal legend about the Manzanita-Nehalem Bay area that has many things in common with LOST. It's called the "Wheeler Moment," and it refers to the town on the bay where - like the island on LOST - strange, serendipitous coincidences happen with startling regularity. Click here for more on the Wheeler Moment and Oregon coast connection to LOST. The area is an hour and a half drive from Portland.

For you LOST heads (or as I call myself, a LOST nerd), here's a bunch of interesting tidbits your Mr Lahey learned - some of which you will have heard, but hopefully plenty that will be new to you. In fact, for Portlanders, there's some more cool info here.

- Did you ever notice how many integral things seem to have happened in 30-yr increments - or at least four years into the decade? They crash in 2004 - then they end up in 1974. When they start bouncing through time, they meet the Others in 1954. When the rest of the crash survivors finally get to the 70's, they hop back from 2007 to 1977.

- In case you didn't see the previous week's subtitled, enhanced re-broadcast of last season's finale, notice that Jacob touches each of the survivors - either in this decade, or in some other time period. He seems to be a little bit like the "hand of fate" itself.

- There are 15 episodes of this season, the last one to be aired on Sunday, May 25. Hmmm....a sunday. Is that also significant?

- When the show is done, the props will be auctioned off for charity. Mr Lahey wants to get him a piece of that.

- Learned many surprises from the co-producers on Jimmy Kimmel: The fact that Shepard has only one bottle of liquor instead of two in the plane is "significant," as is the fact Rose is more calm than him this time around. They said the missing people on that plane (Shannon, et al) will mean something. And the absence of Michael and his son on that plane were called "fate" by them.

- When Jimmy Kimmel asked about Sayid, and that it seemed likely Jacob was inhabiting him now - they said SOMETHING is inhabiting Sayid, but not neccessarily Jacob.

- They also said that numbers will be explained and again figure prominently... i.e. those numbers from Hugo's lottery and the Dharma hatch, et al

- According to one of the interviews, Portland may again figure in the last season. Also released earlier this year, Matthew Fox (Shepard) will move to Oregon when the show is done. Will he move to our lovely neck of the End of the Trail - Portland? (Like Jean Claude van Damme, Johnny Marr, Peter Buck and others have). Will he reside in the boonies of southern Oregon (like Steve Miller did)? Or on the Oregon coast (like Ursula K. Le Guinn or MASH's David Ogden-Stiers)?

- So now we know who the black smoke monster is!!! But what exactly IS he? For that matter, what is Jacob? A big hint, albeit a puzzling one, comes at the very end where the Locke-Smoke Monster-Man in Black tells Benjamin that he wants the ONE thing Locke didn't want - "to go home."

Given that creators have outright said the show will have nothing to do with angels, devils, or aliens, you can rule that out.

So what does that leave?

Another form of life from beneath the sea? That could explain the alternate timeline where the island is buried beneath the waves.

My theory is that Jacob and his Smoke Monster pal are actually from the future - perhaps the distant future. This would explain them not aging, and the unusual qualities of the island that often have to do with temporal abnormalities.