Vageena Davis Posted:

I stopped watching a long time ago, around when they got off the island the first time, I guess. Can you briefly tell me what happened since then?

Define briefly. I don’t really do “brief”, so here’s long… does that work for you?

And I’ve been pre-empted. By someone who did manage to be brief. I fail at life forever.

I’m guessing you mean the end of Season 4… don’t think they’ve gotten off the island any more times than that. (Exploding freighter, 6 of them on a helicopter, that the one you’re thinking of?)

Since then, the island started periodically jumping through time, taking the survivors that were left on the island with it, and there are various time travel shennanigans, but the recurring point is “what happened happened” – they can’t change anything in the past. Eventually Locke fixes the time jumps, but gets teleported to Tunisia in 2007 in the process. He tries to convince the other off-island people to go back (because getting them to go back is important to fix things before … some unspecified bad thing happens. He fails utterly and tries to commit suicide, Ben stops him but then murders him and makes it look like suicide (there was more in that scene that made that vaguely make sense)

Jack and Ben also try to convince people to go back to the island, and Locke being dead helps them do that, so they find out how to go back from mysterious-woman (same one as told Desmond about how he can’t change the future), and she’s also Daniel Faraday’s mother. bumorted coincidence puts the last couple of them on the same plane as the others, and that plane crashes them back onto the island.

Back on the island, after Locke fixed things the main survivors got time-flashed back to 1974, where they join the Dharma Initiative for three years. In the plane crash I just mentioned, the important characters get flashed back to 1977 and reunite with the ones in the DI. Sayid tries to kill young Ben in the past, but he just injures him. Jack refuses to help so Juliet has to take Ben to the Others for magic healing, which is probably what turned him into the weirdo bumhole type that Sayid was trying to get rid of in the first place.

After they got time-flashed off the plane, it carried on crashing onto the island, bringing some new people to the party, along with Ben and Sun and Frank. Locke’s body was in the cargo hold, and he’s come back to life to take over from Ben as the Others’ leader, and he also wants to kill Jacob. Some of the other random plane-people turn out to know more than we thought (I’m still fuzzy on the details of that group) but they burn down Jacob’s cabin, then show the rest of the group Locke’s body – it turns out that Locke really is dead, and what we thought was Locke was some sort of evil anti-Jacob disguised as Locke, but it’s too late – Locke’s already busy getting Ben to kill Jacob.

Back in 1977, the Dharma people are building the station that caused their plane crash at the beginning of the series, and Faraday says they need to destroy the time anomaly under the station when they drill into it, to prevent the original Incident that meant they had to have someone pushing a bumon every 108 minutes, so that the plane won’t crash in the first place, and everything will go back to normality. This kinda contradicts the “what happened, happened” thing, but no-one cares because he’s the crazy scientist who understands time, so he gets to make the rules. So they drop a nuke down a drill-shaft, but it fails to go off, the Incident starts happening and sucks Juliet down the shaft, she whacks the bomb with a rock and the screen goes to white-out for the end of the last episode.

IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.