So the two-hour Lost premiere answered a couple of questions--we now have a better sense of the conflict at the heart of the saga (Jacob vs. his nemesis, who now looks a lot like John Locke when he is not a smoke monster)--and, as expected, raised a bunch more. The show appears to have branched into two storylines: one in which the nuclear explosion reset our characters onto a 2004 Oceanic 815 flight that does not crash (but still experiences some strange happenings and divergences from the established backstory, such as a "lucky" Hurley) and another in which the protagonists stuck in 1977 return to their "proper" time in 2007, wherein apparently the nuke did not explode. All sorts of intriguing possibilities could unfold in this final season. This was a compelling start to the final 16 installments of Lost.
