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From Popular Mechanics:

Lost Season 5 Premiere: 2 Hours of Time Travel, Wormholes and Exotic Matter.

By Erin McCarthy

Published on: January 21, 2009

Travelling Through Time

Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof once told Popular Mechanics that he has “a long and storied history in every single time-travel story that’s ever been written,” and Season Five’s two-part, two-hour premiere, called “Because You Left” and “The Lie,” draws on that knowledge.

Sure enough, last season we saw Ben (the former leader of the Others) activate a wormhole and move the entire island through time and space to protect it from the nefarious Charles Widmore, who has been trying to find the island for 20 years. In the season premiere, we find out that the island is dislodged in time and is now skipping, like a record, through the past and future—at least according to physicist Daniel Faraday, whose personal history on the island appears to date back to the Dharma’s glory days (unless, of course, that was just a trip back through time).

Much of the time-travel physics of the season opener rests on the presence of exotic matter (by definition, matter which violates classical conditions in physics) beneath the Orchid Station, and we get a glimpse of the hatch’s construction in “Because You Left.” In last year’s season finale, Dr. Pierre Chang (as Edgar Halliwax, though he has also appeared as Marvin Candle), the face of the Dharma Initiative’s orientation videos, explained that the exotic matter beneath this particular station—one of several on the island— makes use of the Casimir Effect, which allows scientists to manipulate time.

Physicist and time-travel guru Michio Kaku told Popular Mechanics last year that some scientists believe time travel through holes in space and time, known as wormholes, might be possible, but there are problems that need to be conquered. First, there’s the matter of energy—massive amounts would be needed to create a black hole, which could function as a portal to another point in space and time. But it would be a one-way trip; black holes aren’t stable enough to stay open on their own. Creating a wormhole, a stable portal through space and time that would allow return trips, would require inconceivable amounts of energy—inconceivable, that is, unless you’re on an island that can make paraplegics walk, harbors a monster of smoke and can disappear off the face of the Earth. Physicists have created tiny amounts of energy in the laboratory using the Casimir Effect—quantum fluctuations that can create energy in a vacuum—but what has been generated in the lab isn’t enough to keep a wormhole open, Kaku says. (We first learned about the Casimir Effect in the Orchid Station orientation video in Season Four’s “No Place Like Home.”)

Exotic Material

Chang warns a Dharma worker who is drilling into the earth in an attempt to access a buried wheel (the same wheel that Ben uses to move the island some 30-odd years later) that under no circumstances should workers building the Orchid Station set off charges near the pocket of exotic matter during the construction process. When asked what would happen, Chang says only, “God help us all.”

Exotic matter is hypothetical, and physicists such as Kaku know “almost nothing” about what its properties could be. Such matter would have “formed when the Earth was young, and then floated into outer space,” Kaku says, “and therefore there’s none left on Earth.” However, it may have been possible for a pocket of the matter to become accidentally trapped underground. Physicists theorize that exotic matter could have antigravitational properties (so it would fall up) or it would have negative energy (absorbing energy around it, possibly making it implosive). And if it were to have antigravitational properties, it wouldn’t want to stay on Earth either; instead, it would rocket into space—violently. “It would be quite dangerous to people who encounter it,” says Kaku.

Time Is Like String

Daniel Faraday, the aforementioned physicist who traveled to the island on a freighter charted by über-villain Widmore—and who also may have been part of the Dharma Initiative during the construction of the Orchid Station—warns the castaways that, although they’re skipping through time, they can’t change the past or the future. “Time is like a string,” he explains. “You can move forward, and you can move in reverse, but you can’t create a new string.”

Some physicists actually liken time to a river, says Kaku, which meanders at different speeds through the universe. “There are two ways to resolve the time-travel paradox,” Kaku explains. “One way is, the river of time [forks] into two rivers, so you change a parallel universe’s path, not your own path.” This theory, which asserts that our universe may be just one of an infinite number of universes, is known as the Multiverse Theory, and it’s what Kaku personally believes. The creators of Lost, however, have taken a different approach, one pushed by some Russian physicists, according to Kaku. “They have whirlpools in the river of time, so you leave the timeline and go back into the past,” Kaku says. “They believe that when you go back on a different path, there’s some kind of physical principle preventing you from changing the past to make the future impossible.”

Equations on the Board

And what about those equations Mrs. Hawking—yes, the same woman who told Desmond that he had to ditch his planned proposal to go to the island to save the world—was writing on the chalkboard at the end of “The Lie”? They’re probability equations, which come from quantum mechanics. “The only reason you’d be interested in probability is because you want to calculate radiation effect,” says Kaku. “And radiation has to do with the stability of the wormhole. Say a flashlight was to go through a wormhole. It would go into the past, but [its] photons don’t disappear; they go back in a second time, and go back in and in and in like a circle, until it builds up and the whole thing blows up.” Perhaps dislodging the island in time has made the exotic matter and the wormhole unstable, and that’s why Ben’s ragtag group of the Oceanic Six and other mysterious characters have only 70 hours to get back to the island and make things right before it—or the whole world?—blows up. But those are questions for another time.

MythBuster Adam Savage on Lost Premiere: James Cameron’s Time Travel has NOTHING on Lost.

I’m so glad to be back in the world of Lost—and after seeing the season premiere, I can say it was worth the wait. Somehow the show always seems to get the exact right ratio of questions answered to questions raised, and last night’s season opener was no exception. (Now, I’m trusting them here: If the series finale doesn’t end up with some serious ’splainin’, I’m going to be pretty angry.)

The beginning of this season of Lost reminds me of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite phrases: “Keep your hat on, we could end up miles from here.”

I don’t want to give too much away, even though it’s aired, but I’m not sure I can hold out.

Okay, how about one spoiler. Just one. You ready?

Jack shaves that awful beard off.

Whew! Am I glad to get that off my chest. I HATE Jack’s beard, which seems to have some kind of super-wussifying effect on him, like a reverse Sampson: Jack GAINS power with proper grooming. Thank goodness. Now he and the rest of the Oceanic Six can get back to the island, where they belong. It’s disconcerting to see them out in the world—it’s just not right.

The season opener adds a whole new dimension to the island’s powers. We reconnect with everyone, on the island and off, and it’s clear that they’ve bumped up the question quotient about six-and-a-half notches. Remember in Terminator how you had to wrap your brain around John Connor sending Reese back in time to romance his mom and thus become his father? Yeah, well, that was nothing.

Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, our entire island-bound community of Lost-ites has become unstuck in time. While the Oceanic Six are three years in the future, the survivors on the island have no idea when they are, because they’re zipping back and forth between the past and the future. But they can’t change the past, because, as on-show physicist Daniel Faraday explains, time is like a string, and though one can move back and forth on that string, one can’t create another string. It works well narratively, but I’m not sure if I totally buy it. Of course, Faraday might be lying to save the characters all the trouble of running into themselves and causing a temporal anomaly (or is that Star Trek?).

I love the time-travel thing. LOVE it. Clearly the writers have inculcated themselves with the canon of time-travel movies and literature and they’ve taken it on as a personal challenge. They teased it a bunch last season, but now it’s taken over with gusto. Thankfully we’ve got Faraday—who clearly knows his stuff—as our tour guide through the space–time continuum. I can’t wait to see when—and where—it takes us.

Jeremy Davies’ Faraday is easily my favorite of the new roster of characters (though Miles’ constant Corporal Hicks–like doomsaying is hilarious), but he’s given a heck of a lot of exposition to do, and not everything he says holds up to scrutiny. For instance, why would you need to head on a specific compass bearing to get away from the island? Or why couldn’t he just explain to Sawyer that the island was unstuck in time, instead of saying, “It’d be hard to explain it to a quantum physicist, let alone you.” I dislike when characters aren’t clear with each other in the interest in expediency.

Of course, what we’re watching for isn’t perfect logic from a physics point of view, but a real emotional logic to the characters. I really do want see them fulfill their destinies. (Can you tell I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid?)

As for the other characters: Sun is going to rule the world. Penny is gorgeous. Desmond is special, and the rules of space–time don’t apply to him, but we’re still not sure why. Penny’s father finally takes shape as a central, pivotal character. Ben Linus is STILL not telling anyone everything he knows—and is always looking spooky/scary/smart/creepy—but by now he and Locke are my favorite characters on the show. The jury is totally out for me on whether Locke’s really dead. He’s already been healed once and revived once (after Ben shot him). Ben wants to bring him back to the island, so I don’t think it’s a done deal. I love the idea that there’s a biiiig showdown between them in the offing. Don’t you just know it? I’m sure of it.

And here’s a question: What if the island is an alien spaceship? That’s my new guess.

The good news is that we’re not in the middle of a Season Three slump. Season Five starts off cracking and popping and I’m ecstatic to be Lost again.

From CNN.COM:

‘Lost’ finale may have been series’ best episode

Editor’s Note: The following Associated Press story reveals spoilers from the “Lost” season finale. If you’d rather not know anything, stop reading now.

NEW YORK (AP) — Like the island where so much of the action takes place, “Lost” giveth and it taketh away. Flashes of illumination for its viewers are routinely undone the next moment by bewilderment.

This is a game “Lost” devotees are happy to play — albeit fewer of them lately than there used to be. Four seasons in, the show demands even more of the viewer than it used to. But those who have stuck around know that rewards richly outweigh the frustration.

This was never more so than on Thursday’s two-hour season finale. It might be the most rewarding, deliciously challenging episode in the history of this mystical ABC serial.

Spoiler alert: Read no further if you mean to watch it for yourself and want to preserve its surprises. There are many.

For instance, you get to see the man in the casket at the L.A. funeral home. Though identified at the end of Season 3 as Jeremy Bentham, he is shown to the audience at long last, lying in pasty-faced repose: none other than John Locke.

But how did Locke, who embraced life on the island, get to Los Angeles? And how did he die? Let the guessing begin.

Another mystery addressed: that recent crazy talk about “moving the island.” Darned if it doesn’t happen! But not like moving a couch from one room to another. This was moving from Now to Who-Knows-Where-Or-When.

Ben did it deep within a chamber of the Dharma Initiative’s Station 6, where experiments had previously been conducted in time travel. Ben made the island disappear along with its occupants (including Locke, Sawyer and Juliet), while, aloft in their helicopter, Jack, Kate and several others watched in disbelief.

Yikes! Time, not just space, is now a way to separate and torment the characters — and amplify the “Lost” narrative.

From the start four seasons ago, “Lost” roamed freely from the island where its characters were stranded. The series interspersed the “present-day” island story lines with scenes that captured its characters prior to their fateful flight on Oceanic Airlines flight 815.

But in the final moments last season, “Lost” added another dimension to the saga: propelling the action into the future, to offer glimpses of how certain characters readjust to the “normal” world.

The flash-forwards have given “Lost” an intriguing new perspective on the characters who got out. But their post-rescue lives are also shedding light on what took place on the island — and serve as a reminder to the audience that, even for those characters who came home, there’s no escaping. Not yet, anyway.

The finale makes clear how, for the safety of the “Oceanic Six” as well as any comrades they left behind, everything that happened on the island must stay secret.

“We’re gonna have to lie,” says Jack.

“Lie about what?” Sayid asks.

“All of it,” Jack answers. “Every moment since we crashed on the island.”

“Jack, we can’t pull it off,” argues Kate.

But, however difficult, they apparently don’t have any choice. Dangers from the island have followed them. (Why are people stalking Hurley at his L.A. mental ward?)

Meanwhile, the island is a powder keg of unfinished business, at least for one haunted survivor. Jack remains obsessed by the notion that he was the cause of some disaster there, and that he must go back and, somehow, make things right.

This could be tough, and not just because the island might be awfully hard to find. The season’s bitterly funny punch line comes courtesy of Ben, who somehow pops up in the funeral home to deliver Jack a message.

“The island won’t let you come alone,” Ben tells him. “ALL of you have to go back.” And that includes the deceased John Locke.

Brilliantly, tantalizingly, the “Lost” finale hints at the season to come, where time travel likely will be part of the mix. Yet another element of intrigue is looming when Season 5 arrives early next year. If only time travel could make it come quicker.