Lost [1] finally returns for it's fifth season this month so I thought I'd compile my theories and speculation. Season four of Lost was certainly one of my favorites, it was more fast paced than the previous years and had an awesome story arch. Over the course of the last season we saw the arrival of the freighter and the "science team" which turned out to be really anything but what the said they were. Season four culminated with the destruction of the freighter, the rescue of the Oceanic Six and the disappearance of the island. This is where Lost's fifth season picks up...Picking up right where we left off
Season premier episodes of Lost tend to pick up exactly where the previous season finale left off. When season one ended with Locke and Jack blowing up the hatch, season two started with Desmond peering up from the Swan station just after the explosion. Seasons three and four were a little different as they were prefaced with a flashback/forward respectively, but we always resume the action right where we were at the end of the previous season. I don't think season five will start any differently. In fact, I think the premier will start with Ben and Jack standing in the funeral parlor with Locke's body. The main story arch of season five as I see it now is the return of the Oceanic Six to the island, and where better to start than the moment Ben and Jack (of all people) join forces to go back.ABC has already put out a press release stating that the name of the first two episodes of season five (airing on the same night). The first episode is titled "Because You Left" which is what Jack said Locke told him regarding all of the bad things that happened on the island. I doubt we'll see this conversation take place between Jack and Locke, off the island, so early in season five because it seems so pivotal to the larger story. I do think however that Ben will keep pushing the issue with Jack, that all of the losties still left on the island will die if the Oceanic Six don't return.
Aside from Sun and possibly Sayid, the rest of the Oceanic Six don't seem to be in a place where they'd want to go back to the island. Kate is living a somewhat normal life with Claire's Aaron and Hurley has been holed up at Santa Rosa playing chess with Eko's ghost and having regular chats with Charlie. Hurley would probably be the most easily convinced to return to the island. He's said that he isn't happy lying about Flight 815 and that may have a lot to do with the title of the second episode "The Lie." This will probably be the episode in which Hurley realizes he should return to the island so he doesn't have to lie about the others and stop whatever harm is going to come to them.
Kate will probably be the lone hold out of the six. Claire has appeared to Kate in visions, telling her never to take Aaron back to the island, and she didn't seem real thrilled at Jack's insistence that they all needed to go back. The only reason I can think of that Kate would want to return to the island would be if there were new legal issues that forced her back on the run. With Aaron in tow she may be more likely to sign on to the cause, even more so if those legal issues have to do with custody of Aaron.
With Sayid working for Ben, I don't think it'll be hard to convince Sayid to return to the island, especially since Nadia is dead - what else does Sayid have keeping him away from the island? Sun seems to be preparing to return to the island on her own, or at least with the help of Widmore. In the last season finale Sun did say that her and Widmore have common interests, which seems to indicate that they're both looking for the island. If Ben can convince her that Jin is still alive and he knows how to reunite them, I'm sure she'd be on board. One thing that wasn't brought up in the finale was whether or not Locke tried to contact Sun. If he had met with Sun, as he did with the other Oceanic Six, wouldn't he have told her about Jin's fate?
Meanwhile, Back on the Island
When we last saw Locke alive, he was being accepted into the Others' community. Ben told Locke that the Others would be waiting for him, willing to follow his every word. So we can assume Locke is now the leader of the Others. But there must be more to it. What would Locke do with the Others under his command without having freighter people to fight or some crisis on the island? Locke had said in season three that if Ben and others knew what the island really was, they wouldn't be putting chicken in their refrigerator. Richard Alpert eluded to something similar when talking about Ben distracting the Others with the pregnancy problem. If Richard and Locke are going to try to get the island back on track, does this mean tearing up all the Dharma stations? What about the remaining Losties? Should they be "purged"? I think the writers will give Locke a brand new crisis instead of sending him on a killing spree.Time isn't of the essence, it IS the essence
When Ben moved the island, the sky turned purple - just like what happened when Desmond turned the failsafe key that imploded the Swan and sent him back in time six or seven years. I think a similar temporal jump is what happened to the island, after all it did look a bit like the island imploded when it "moved", didn't it?Before Ben moved the island, Locke was watching the orientation film for the Orchid in which Pierre Chang confirmed that there are some properties to the island that allow for some sort of time travel. Just like Desmond's time travel experience in which he was reliving events and had some ability to move freely and was more than just an observer, I think the island and everyone on it were sent back in time with the same ability to move about freely and interact with whatever inhabitants they find.
The most logical (storywise) time for the island to be set in would be the time of Dharma, a group which we still don't know all that much about. I think this would shed a great deal of light on two of the characters we met last season. I think Faraday and Charlotte were both members of Dharma in once sense or another. Faraday makes the most sense because he is a physicist, and Dharma certainly would have been able to put his skills to good use. Faraday's notebook is full of info on events that have happened thus far, is it possible that he worked as a scientist at the Orchid and through some sort of mishap (or intentional cause) he or his conscience was sent back to 1996 where he met Desmond? Perhaps we'll see Dharma Faraday running around the island in some capacity. As for Charlotte, she opted to stay on the island because she was searching for the place where she was born... which sounds odd, but almost certainly means she was born on the island and more than likely, to a Dharma family.
Other characters that we're likely to learn more about as a result of jumping back in time to the Dharma days would be Radzinsky and Montand. Radzinsky was Kelvin's partner in the Swan station before he shot himself in the head with a shotgun. If we return to the time of Radzinsky, it'd be great to learn more about why he was compelled to paint the blast door map and where all of that information came from. Montand, on the other hand, was supposedly a crash survivor along with Rousseau who lost his arm and succumbed to either the sickness or Rousseau's gun. Flashing back to the time of Dharma's purge means we could see the exact conditions that lead to Rousseau's solitary exile by the others as well as Alex's capture.
One hope of mine is that the time period is fluid or in flux, but not so much that it becomes ridiculous. If the show starts jumping from one significant event to another to another over the course of 30 years in just a few episodes, it'll seem less like the writers are telling the story of the island in a quasi believable sense and more like they are trying to wrap things up by showing us all the interesting bits before they run out of time. I doubt this will happen, I have yet to be disappointed by Lost and I'm sure season five will be just as enjoyable as the others.
Most speculation and analysis will come in the near future as the fifth season of Lost starts airing.