So ... I've never seen a minute of the current season. Should I stop right where I am?

They never told us it was Jacob. We assumed it was Jacob and that were predicting Jacob may be Locke or Christian. The show never told us this was fact.

When did they tell us this? I was always under the impression that these were conclusions we came to, not conclusions the show told us.

How are they bait and switching when they never told us any of this? We assumed it, predicted it, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly.

I get being annoyed with the show. I've been annoyed with so many unanswered questions. I'm trying to understand why you are annoyed that the show is going in a direction different then the assumptions and predictions the people on the interwebs (all over the interwebs) have come to.

Or else I'm totally a ditz and forgot where they showed us all this conclusively.

Why are you reading this thread? It's all spoiled.

1) I will never get being annoyed at unanswered questions. The point of the show is unanswered questions. When the questions are answered, the show is over. 2) It's not that it's going in a different direction than predicted, it's that it has introduced something that entirely invalidates everything we've known up until now. It's "not only did you guess wrong, you guessed wrong because we've completely hidden a vital piece of information that didn't allow you to even remotely come close to the correct guess. Everything you've learned about characters' motivations and relationships is 100% invalid now, start again."

In other words, I'd much prefer explanations that lead to me thinking, 'Ooooooh, THAT'S how that all makes sense," instead of, "WTF? That changes everything!"

Let me pull out my crystal ball and determine whether you personally will like the season, as well as the season that doesn't exist yet...

They went to Jacob's cabin. Ben said it was Jacob in there. Christian claimed he was Jacob at one point.

Not that saying something conclusively has ever stopped them from changing the "facts" on us.

When they put Esau in the picture and told us it was him that was Locke, it infers that there are two supernatural beings at play when we only knew about one. The inference is clear, as JW posted. Even if you don't go that far it still means that everything is up for questioning.

There are twists when characters do things we don't expect, there are twists when new information is revealed about existing circumstances. This is NOT a twist, because this character was not in play for the last 5 years.

I really don't know how else I can put it.

I'm not picking on Jen, I'm trying to understand.

I don't see it as hiding a vital piece of information from us, I see it as us making assumptions about something, and we assumed wrong.

I don't interpret the finale the same way you two do, so obviously we have to agree to disagree, I'm just trying to look at it from a different perspective.

Heheh, not with my memory, which is just that nowadays.

By the time the DVDs come out, I will have forgotten the 4 posts I read.

The PTB on this show have been hiding and subsequently revealing important pieces of information from day one. It's what they do. It's what this show is about.

It's OK, the finale of Season 6 will reveal that it's all just Jack's Big Dream Sequence. He'll wake up and go to work as normal, except he'll get chased by the smoke monster, which turns out to be a swarm of killer bees... but we're the ones who will have been stung.

Except the important pieces of information have (for the most part) been plausible - but now they're travelling off to cloud-cuckoo-land. We've suspected it will happen all along, so we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed, really.