Forget everything I said in my season five recap about John Locke being f***ing invincible. Because he’s not – he’s totally dead. So the guy who’s been walking around the island for the past season? That wasn’t Locke, it was the Smoke Monster.

Yeah, you read right. The Smoke Monster.

Lost is back like it forgot something.

What if…this is an alternate reality?

Season six starts off in the now infamous flight scene, aboard Oceanic flight 815. Jack’s talking to the stewardess and comforting Rose while Bernard is in the bathroom. Charlie’s in the other bathroom, not doing anything illegal or attracting attention to himself at all (oh…wait…), Kate’s in handcuffs next to her bounty hunter (whom she later escapes from…again. I would shoot myself in the face if Kate was outsmarting me on a regular basis, I swear. He’s useless.), the whole nine yards. Except, this time – things are different. Shannon’s not with Boone, the passengers don’t look like they did at the beginning of the series (nor do they sit in the same seats), and Desmond (?!?) is on board. Hmm. The plane encounters turbulence, and just when you think the crash is about to happen again, it regains its in-flight footing and continues on to a safe landing in Los Angeles. So…this can’t be a flash back. Or a flash forward. My best guess is that it’s either somebody’s dream sequence, an alternate reality or a “what if?” scenario. Though I’m leaning toward alternate reality, considering that the survivors still have interactions with and connections to each other. The biggest things that happen here involve Christian Shephard’s coffin going missing in what has to be the worst case of lost baggage ever, Kate (once again) managing to pull one over on her lame duck bounty hunter, Jin getting taken away by customs and Claire appearing out of nowhere in a taxi cab as Kate makes her escape. Oh, and the entire island is shown to be underwater – Dharma houses, foot statue and all. There’s even a cute little Dharma shark to go with. So is this a “what if?” Is it an alternate reality? Is it a result of the Jughead bomb? What if it’s none of the above?

You’re alive! Oh, wait…never mind, you’re dead.

The survivors wake up after Juliet detonates the Jughead bomb, having been scattered around the surrounding jungle like confetti. It’s never outright stated what time period they’re now in, but they appear to be in the present. And Sawyer is pissed. After everything they went through to set the bomb off, in hopes that it would make it to where the plane crash had never happened, it doesn’t appear to have worked. Which would mean that Juliet died for nothing. Before he can get even halfway into the first stage of grief over it, noises are heard from underneath the wreckage. Juliet is alive – sort of. The survivors dig her out and Sawyer rushes over to hold her as she dies, right before telling him that “it worked,” according to Miles. (WHAT worked?) Well, that sucks. You think your girlfriend’s dead, you find out she’s alive, then she dies in your arms? Your Life Is Awful. Much of the same sort of back and forth goes on later, after a (dead) Jacob appears to Hurley and instructs him to take a (dying) Sayid to the temple, because it’s the only way to save his life. Hurley convinces the rest of the group to go along with this, only to have the somewhat unfriendly inhabitants of the temple (whom I guess we’re supposed to just assume are more “Others” that have just been off the radar for six seasons? Yeah, right.) drown the remaining life out of him. But then he wakes up at the end of the episode…if we’re to believe it’s really him, anyway. I don’t believe anything anymore. Not after spending an entire season thinking that Locke had defied all laws of…living and dying…only to find out that no, Locke died in the fourth season and stayed dead. The Man In Black, also known as the Smoke Monster, also known as the physical manifestation of evil on the island has taken the form of Locke, presumably because he was the closest one to the island, and the only one who didn’t want to go home. This just raises more questions about what has and what hasn’t actually been real this entire time – Christian Shephard, to start with. Was that just the Man In Black? What about the polar bears? Nikki and Paolo? I’m beginning to wonder if any of the unexplained island phenomena was really real.

Don’t talk back to the Man In Black

After watching Ben (awkwardly) stab Jacob to death and burning his corpse in a fire, “Locke” sends Ben outside to summon Richard “I swear I don’t wear eyeliner” Alpert inside the foot statue. When he gets outside, however, Ben stumbles upon what the Ajira survivors have just discovered – the body of the actual John Locke. Understandably, his mind is blown for a few minutes. Some of the more vocal survivors demand to know what’s going on inside of the statue, and they force Ben to take them inside. Big mistake. “Locke” transforms into the Smoke Monster, kills everyone except for Ben, then goes outside to get Richard himself…which he does by nearly crippling the guy, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and storming off. Yikes. This should be interesting. He tells Ben that he wants the one thing that John Locke didn’t – to go home. But if he’s the Smoke Monster, he kind of IS home on the island, isn’t he? Unless he’s actually from Georgia or something.

And so the countdown begins to the series finale of Lost, and I think I’ve figured out the writer’s strategy – keep introducing more questions so you won’t have to answer the old ones. And if that doesn’t work, just keep sticking cliffhangers before the 5 minute long commercial breaks. Lost is going to give me gray hair this season, I just know it. But I’ll put up with all the curve balls and plot twits in the world, if in the end I get to watch Kate die a long, drawn out, miserable death. Come on, Lost writers. After taking Charlie and Boone away from me, it’s the least you could do.