Lost: The Final Season Premiere

**We don't think there are any spoilers here, but if you're concerned wait until Tuesday night to read this post!**

 

We spent Saturday afternoon camped out on a Waikiki beach awaiting the final season premiere of Lost.  We would not consider ourselves obsessive fans - we didn't make special t-shirts, we didn't book a flight on Friday afternoon just to see the premiere, and we don't maintain a Lost blog.  Heck, R hasn't seen an episode since 2006.  (Though A made R watch two recaps and the season 5 finale to prepare.  R tried hard, but she fell asleep during those viewings.)  But, we were here and probably would have spent most of the day sitting on the beach anyway.  So we packed our picnic, lounge chairs, and books and settled in for the day.  

setting up the screen

fortunately the day was occasionally cloudy so we didn't fry

Here are two of our pics from the red carpet.  They're super blurry because our camera in 12x digital zoom is definitely not quality.

We were sitting behind an extra who claims he played a young Jin in Season 3.  He managed to take the Lost blogger sitting next to us "backstage" and he scored these great photos:

 

  

After the red carpet the actors, writers, and directors were introduced one at a time on stage.  Most of the primary actors were there (character names are listed because we haven't the attention span to look up all of the actors' names):  Benjamin Linus, Richard, Frank, Kate, Jack, Hurley, Sayid, Jin, Sun, Sawyer, Michael, Ilana, Desmond, Miles, and some guy who was at the Arctic station.

ABC then aired an 8 min 15 second recap of seasons 1-5.  We're not sure if they're going to air it during the "Premiere Event" on Tuesday, but we highly recommend viewing it.  The crowd really enjoyed it.

ABC only showed the first "hour" keeping the audience waiting until Tuesday night to see the rest.  (We're not sure when an hour became 42 minutes, but at least it was commercial-free.)  Here's our teaser:




The audience was polite; people tried not to block other viewers.  Since season 5 ended in a cliffhanger (duh), everyone cheered when a favorite character made an appearance on screen.

Lost was followed immediately by an episode of Modern Family, but not surprisingly it wasn't really viewable with the surrounding commotion.  Lots of people made a rush to turn in their ABC surveys in exchange for a t-shirt (see photo at the top).  Patient people waited for the crowds to subside and then elbowed their way to the front.

Our take?  The first hour wasn't that exciting and we're hoping hour 2 whets our appetites for the season.  One thing we can tell you - black smoke is back.