Last season revealed to us that six characters would be able to get off of the island, and it was all about who gets off, how they get off and what happens to the people that get left behind. In the end, Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Hurley (Jorge Garcia), Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Aaron made it back to the civilized world. The Oceanic Six then made up a lie to prevent people from looking for other survivors to protect both their friends and the island itself, but over the course of three years, events happen that cause them to have to go back. This season is all about them getting back to the island, what those left behind do in those three years and what happens when they all get back together again.
On the island, it seems Jacob's order to move the island has worked; Ben (Michael Emerson) turned a strange wheel, and both he and the island disappeared. While Ben ends up in the middle of the desert and starts his standard manipulation tricks in order to get his revenge, Locke (Terry O'Quinn), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Faraday (Jeremy Davis), Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), Miles (Ken Leung) and the rest of the survivors are dealing with an all new problem. It seems that moving the island has caused them to become unstuck in time as they jump from past to future on the island and see everything from young Rousseau's (now played by Melissa Farman instead of Mira Furlan as the older version) arrival on the island, to the drug-dealer plane crashing, even going back far enough to see the four-toed statue in its full glory (finally). As the group tries to find out what they need to do in order to stop their violent travels, they stumble upon The Others a couple of times and we get to see the ageless Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell), and young Eloise Hawking (who is played by Alexandra Krosney, Alice Evans and Fionnula Flanagan at different points in time) and Charles Widmore (played by Tom Connolly, David S. Lee and Alan Dale).
Meanwhile, off the island, it seems that Locke's appearance off the island and talks with each of the people who got off didn't amount to a whole lot, that is, until he ended up dead and Ben convinces Jack to get everyone together and back on a plane. This first third of the season ends with another plane crash with most of the people all finding each other in 1977 where those left behind have joined Dharma and those reuniting with them trying to figure out why they are 30 years in the past.
Like most seasons of Lost, there are quite a few twists, turns and mysteries introduced (and a few questions answered as well), so I don't want to discuss who ends up where/when or any other details after those first six or seven episodes, but fans who are intrigued by the premise so far aren't going to be disappointed in how the season plays out.
Lost: The Complete Fifth Season has the types of special features that fans of the show have come to expect. Besides the typical bloopers and deleted scenes, and a series of episode-specific behind-the-scenes featurettes called Lost on Location, it also includes a featurette of Emerson going around Building 23 in Anaheim to talk to the people behind the scripts, as well as another one about the time travel aspects of the season. There is also a featurette about the show's 100th episode, "The Variable," and following Carbonell during the season's last day of shooting as he goes in for both a day and night shooting.
I also enjoyed the "found" 1980's documentary called "Mysteries of the Universe" concerning an investigation of the secretive Dharma Initiative. This is interesting because it looks, feels and sounds like it was recorded on a VHS from TV, right up to using the old ABC logo, bits of commercials that were edited out that reference old shows and even some tracking issues along the bottom of the screen. It really is a fun documentary similar to Season Four's "The Oceanic Six: A Conspiracy of Lies."
Lost: The Complete Fifth Season also launches Lost University, which is for all intents and purposes BD-Live, but done in a way that I haven't seen before. Here, you enroll and attend classes on everything from time travel theories to ancient civilizations (with a special focus on Egypt, of course), to language and philosophy (which explores the real Hume, Locke, Bentham and Rousseau). Basically, you sign up for courses. Each class in the course has you watching a video interviewing real experts in these fields. After the first class, you are asked to do some homework (typically personal research on the topic discussed), and then a couple of days later, you can come back (yes it forces you to wait) and attend the next class. Once you've done all your classes, you can take the final exam and mark that particular course off of your sheet. Eventually, Semester 2 will open up with new courses to attend and more credits to earn. You will also receive e-mail-styled messages about your different classes and fun-to-read load screens about events at the Lost University. There is also an online component that connects to your player-based account to give you more access to your coursework. The one issue I had with this system is that, when you enroll, you are assigned a Student ID and a PIN. You not only use this to log back into your player-based-account, but also your online one. The problem is, I couldn't find any reference to my PIN after I enrolled. My Student ID showed up on a couple of screens, but my PIN (essentially my password) was not only nowhere to be found, but no apparent way to fetch, change or reset it. Which means, if you didn't write it down that one time, you won't be able to log in again or finish your setup on the Lost University website. Besides this issue though, I found Lost University to be a nice and unique approach to providing viewers with future featurettes and amusing clips (like the "How to Survive on a Deserted Island" presentation). Of course, like all of the online-based special features, the value of this particular feature is all based on how long the service will be available, and in this particular case, how long they will continue to update it. I suspect the feature won't go long past Semester 2 since that starts up right around the time of Lost's final season's premiere.
Lost: The Complete Fifth Season has got a lot of good episodes in it. We not only get to see a lot of The Island's past through the season's first few episodes, but we also get to see Faraday's full back story, we learn of a few more character connections and Ben even gets beat up a couple of times, who could ask for anything more? I do have one note - while past seasons have looked absolutely gorgeous on Blu-ray, I find that this season's few beach scenes and mostly interior settings means that, while the show still looks great, it isn't quite as awe-inspiring as before. Both sound and video is still great, but it just doesn't quite compare with the visuals of past seasons.
