… and then they get back together, but as estranged, distant partners. So even though Sun and Jin now seem to be in the same timeline in both alt worlds, ensuring they’ll get back together in the crashed timeline, Cuse and Lindelof have no doubt undercut that reunion. While this makes me wanna shake my fist as a fan, it’s also pretty masterful storytelling gamesmanship.

As the plane landed, the background music seemed to be almost triumphant – that Jack has succeeded in his mission and everything would turn out okay. To the uninformed viewers, the narrative signals going on within this timeline would certainly signal this. Though watching it myself I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of unease, that what I was watching wasn’t supposed to happen, and I was far more comfortable with the 2007 scenes featuring “my” characters. The plane landing scene subsequently became a sequence of melancholy – no one knows each other and five seasons of character development is eradicated. I think ultimately this will be resolved, but it will interesting to see if any other moments will be open to interpretation based on narrative context.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jmittell: My 2 day-after #Lost posts: at @AntennaBlog about narrative issues http://bit.ly/8XqMNF & my blog about ratings http://bit.ly/aIwPBh…

one point you make: “Additionally, they effectively teased the audience with questions about Jack’s internal thoughts in the first few sequences, as there were enough ambiguous references to past events like recognizing Desmond to hint that he might remember island life…” is interesting. i immediately thought this was simply reference to the pre-oceanic 815 meeting in the stadium where desmond was training and jack was running up the stairs. sort of assuring us that some things changed (like the single serving of vodka) and some things didn’t (their brief encounter). thoughts?