We've forgotten about the main character of the series by justonemoretime

Season one was our introduction to all of the characters. We got to see each of them in a flashback, while their "present reality" introduced the most interesting character on the show: the Island.

Season two was about other groups of people living on the island (the Others and the Tailes), but it was largely about finding out what was in the Swan and discovering other Dharma stations -- i.e., the Island's character got deeper and more mysterious.

Season three gave us more of the Others and more of Dharma. It also gave us more Island mysteries: pregnancy and healing. We begin to see that time behaves strangely on the Island (think Desmond and Charlie) and that is exceedingly difficult for the outside world to reach the Island (Penny; The Freighter).

Season four was about the desire to leave the Island, and largely devoted (in flashforwards) to showing how fucked everyone was after they left the Island. It was also about power struggles, both between the Losties themselves, and also between the Losties and the freighterfolk, etc. Space and time become more loopy on the Island this season, and Christian gets spookier.

Season five was all about the Island. First, where season 4 showed what bad things happened to people who left the Island, season 5 showed the bad things that happened to those left on the Island after some of them had left. We find out much more about the history of the Island -- tons about Dharma, for instance, as well as some ancient stuff like the statute. Most importantly, the season was about the Island apparently becoming unmoored in space and time. Think about how weird the Island was last season.

So what role has the Island played this season? The major premise of this season is that at the end of the last season we had the characters try to manipulate history so they would never wind up on the Island to begin with. We've got characters on the Island, and they're in the Temple which is cool and all, with Dogen and all these dudes we've never seen before; and we've got the lighthouse and Smokie... but what about the Island? No one's talking about it.

Half of the season (the flash-sideways) so far has been devoted to exploring what would have happened to the Losties if the Island essentially did not exist. Specifically, what would have happened to the Losties if the Island was on the bottom of the ocean. It isn't proper for me to use the past tense like this (i.e. to say "what would have happened") because we really don't know what the nature of the alt-universe is. But we know that what makes it different from the universe we know so well is that the Island is on the bottom of the ocean.

What I'm thinking is that we are deliberately being made to focus on things other than the Island, because the Island is going to come back in a big way. My hunch is that something awful/a lot of awful things are going to happen to the characters in the "alt" universe, and that this will make exactly clear what the Island's importance is and why it was the Losties' "destiny" to go to the Island.

It's also worth noting that this season so far parallels season one very closely. Structurally, the flash-sideways have proceeded in the same order that the original flashbacks did. On a narrative level, we're being introduced to the main characters as if for the first time -- just like in season one. This time around they've been profoundly and fundamentally 'tweaked', so even though we've sort of met everyone before... we haven't really. So if that kind of character development parallels the first season, what about the Island? The whole time that we were learning about the characters the first time around we were getting more and more creeped out by the Island itself. This time around we're getting more and more creeped out by Jacob and the MiB. What does that suggest about their relationship with the Island?