Last night, “Damon, Carlton and a Polar Bear” got its first update for the summer game that’s beginning, and the URL for Ronie Midfew Arts now redirects to DC&PB. Something I should mention: in addition to Spoiler TV, the Lost ARGs blog will be following the game as well, so you can check there for updates.

The game itself? DC&PB now shows a picture gallery with 16 picture frames. One is filled in, displaying a photograph (more on that in a second) and the rest are blank with blue question marks in their centers — except for the 16th, which has a red question mark. 15 will be lost, the 16th will be found, anyone? There’s also a link at the bottom right which reads “Hub” and seems to take you to the same information you would find by individually clicking on the pictures in the Gallery, although perhaps that will change in the future.

In the past couple of months, there have been a few Lost-related announcements, as well as the usual fun stuff at ComicCon. I’ve been putting this off for a while (wading into the ComicCon stuff is always a nightmare) but here’s what we have for you! Be warned — there are likely to be spoilers for the upcoming season.

This episode, like every finale episode, starts right off by slamming us with information. We see Jacob, learn that he has a mysterious (nameless) friend who is looking for a “loophole” so he can kill him, and we get a really clear view of the statue. What more answers could we really demand? Well, they do give us one more tidbit: Kate is a New Kids on the Block fan. And, perhaps of more interest to those of you not born in 1983, Jacob has been interested in the Losties for a long time.

In case you might have forgotten, the season finale of Lost airs next week! There’s going to be a clip show (of course) followed by two hours of finale. And then we wait another 40 weeks or so, and then we’ll have our last 17 episodes of Lost, ever (and every single question we can possibly think of will be answered, right?). So of course I’ll blog next week and try to keep up on the Season 6 speculation — keep your eye on this space!

I’m sure you all could have guessed that I really love an episode that opens with Jack getting the crud beaten out of him. It was the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in weeks. Then he tries to tell Kate that the last 3 years have been misery, without acknowledging that, for her, going “back in time” and making the plane land in LA successfully, would mean a pretty hefty prison sentence. Oh, Jack. Do you ever think? Sometimes I think he’s actually a better person during his nightmare descents into booze and pills (and facial hair).

I ended up not blogging last week’s clip show, since there wasn’t anything new in it that I noticed (even though that’s what we were promised); there will be another clip show airing just before the finale in May.

As Betsey pointed out, this episode should have been pretty amazing if it’s called “The Variable,” in contrast to “The Constant,” which is pretty widely considered to be the best episode of Lost so far. And yet I didn’t really love it — I think it just brought up a ton of unanswerable questions, given the information we currently have, and I’m not entirely sure what to think of those questions. At the end of this episode, we know that Eloise has been trying to get Daniel to go to the Island for years, she’s kind of working with Ben and with Widmore, simultaneously, to make this happen, and he has recently become convinced that time travelers CAN change the past. But we have no idea why, or if he’s right, or if his perceptions of what’s going to happen and what has happened are coming from a reliable narrator. Is his idea that Hawking was wrong about “their destiny” something we should believe? Or should we assume, from the ending of the episode, that she’s been right all along and he’s the one who’s been tragically mistaken? Basically, I don’t know what to think and I don’t think I’m going to get any great ideas before next week’s episode! The only thing I know for sure is that Sawyer should have killed Phil, or at the very least he could have had his TWO surgeon friends use some pharmaceuticals to keep him from being such a death sentence.

Sorry for never having the chance to update last week! To make up for it I wanted to include some hieroglyphic treats but it looks like there’s still not a TON of translation information out there. Still, it’s a start.

UPDATE: In the scene where Jack is cleaning blackboards in the Dharma classroom, it’s apparent the students are learning Egyptian history.

“Some Like It Hoth” was an enjoyable episode — I’m really liking everything we see this season — but it was a bit light on juicy tidbits and answers. I think a lot of people had already come to the conclusion that Chang was Miles’ father, so while it was good to see it confirmed it didn’t completely bowl me over. I guess it could be interesting later if we find out that the mystery of the Island is somehow related to all the daddy issues that folks seem to have, but I’m having trouble seeing how that could come together for all of these characters and have any relation to the Island. Plus, it seems pretty plausible that whatever reason Chang had for “getting rid of” his wife and child, it turned out to be for the best for them safety-wise. Perhaps the “incident” we’ve heard so much about wasn’t entirely a surprise to Dr. Marvin Candle? While otherwise this was an interesting story and set up some drama for the new episode two weeks from tonight, it didn’t advance the mystery too much.

Wow, there was a lot here! Tons of stuff in The Temple, Ben flushing his closet to make Smokey come out, Ilana and friends acting like maybe they’re Others, and the Island definitively choosing Locke over Ben while Alex basically spits in his face in front of a ton of hieroglyphics.

One of the first things we learn in this episode is that, as of 1977, “Jacob” is still an important entity. There had been some speculation that, as leadership changed from Widmore to Ben (and had changed from someone else to Widmore before that), the entity known as Jacob changed too, in name alone or in true identity. And seriously, this kid who plays Ben creeps me out. He looks like someone I used to know.

I’ve been really excited to see this episode ever since I found out what it was called. And that was before last week’s episode, when we watched Sayid shoot Ben. So as soon as I saw that scene play out, I thought of this title, and figured that this meant Ben couldn’t really have been killed.

Today I woke up, flew to San Diego, rented a car, and drove up a mountain. Upon arriving here, the first thing I did was figure out how I was going to watch Lost (well, not quite — I did take care of some pretty key responsibilities first). Josh let me know via email that this episode was going to “make [me] crazy” and that I was going to lose my MIND, so of course I watched it as soon as I could.

From the moment I saw the “Previously . . . on Lost!” scenes, I know I was going to get another episode based around Sayid, my favorite character. On the other hand, I kind of remembered what used to happen on Lost when a character would get a flashback episode. For most of this episode, I thought Sayid was going to end up dead at the end of it. I really enjoyed how the first scene of him growing up in Iraq tried to trick us into thinking he was the sweet, gentle boy, sort of like the childhood scenes of Eko. But, of course, Sayid is a total torturer from the very beginning. And Ben clearly is a sociopath from a very young age. Kind of a match made in heaven!

I really enjoyed this episode, but as far as “clues” it was a little bit light. The only thing that really jumped out at me was Radzinsky’s threat to “call Ann Arbor” and get them involved. The DeGroots, the founders of the Dharma Initiative, are, in the backstory of Lost, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Pierre Chang is also an astrophysicist. Maybe, then, this was a hint that we could eventually get some more info on this side of things. And I think we got our answer about how Sayid ended up on the plane: Ben used his knowledge to have Sayid taken into custody by a private bounty hunter. This also explains why Sayid didn’t seem too shocked when we first saw him on Ajira 316 a couple of episodes ago: he knows full well that there are no coincidences in the Lost universe, and that Ben probably had something to do with what was going on. Otherwise, though, this episode was fairly straightforward.

Until the last ten seconds, of course. But I don’t really know what to say about that! Actually, I was here at the observatory when they aired the episode where Locke was shot by Ben, and fell into the ditch filled with Dharma bodies, so to say the least I’m not really convinced that shooting someone and leaving them for dead really cuts it on Lost Island. This is especially true since we have every reason to believe that Ben is in Jacob’s favor when he’s a young guy. Without having any way at all of knowing what’s going to happen next, I really don’t want to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what’s going on. Generally, though, I tend to agree with Faraday: “What happened, happened.” If I had to guess right now — let’s say Sayid was holding a gun to my head — I would say that young Ben has to survive, since we have Old Ben. That doesn’t mean he needs to be totally unscathed, but I do expect that Sayid didn’t just completely thwart the space-time continuum along with Stephen Hawking. And we have to admit it would be pretty amazing if Ben shows up, as Henry Gale, in 2004, knowing full well that Sayid Jarrah tried to kill him when he was a little boy.

It’s fully possible, of course, that this is completely wrong, and that the past has been changed. After all, Ben referred to his father in the past tense when he went to see Sayid (“I really hated him”) and if I didn’t have the bias of wanting to believe that the past couldn’t change, I could totally get on board with the idea that Ben set that van, full of his father, on fire, even though we know that Ben in the usual timeline doesn’t kill Roger until 1992. If this show just changed the timeline, it totally changed the game.

I’m exhausted and tomorrow night I stay up all night, so I’m going to sign off for now and probably won’t have a chance to do much more than this for this week. Luckily, it was more of a character-driven filler episode than a real plot developer. Let me know if you find or think of anything!

As a closing note, I would like to point out to the ads for The Haunting in Connecticut that the movie you’re promoting is not, in fact, “based on a true story.” For the love of Mike.

On Wednesday this week, I’ll be traveling to California to spend about a week at the Palomar Observatory. So I’ll be watching Lost a little late (probably on Pacific time), but I should have something posted by the time you all wake up in the morning.

This episode opens with more evidence that, in its fifth season, Lost is serious about answering questions. Just a couple of weeks back, we were left wondering what had happened to Ajira Airlines flight 316, and tonight we started things out with a scene that gave us lots of useful information on this front. The Lost of 3 years ago would have never given out that kind of instant gratification! We got to see the runway, which was fairly exciting — was the runway built for this specific event? Did Ben or Jacob know about it this far in advance? Or was it more of an all-purpose runway, given that this Island seems to attract crashes?

Once again, this episode gives us answers to a bunch of questions, but puts us in a situation where we have no idea what’s going on or what’s going to happen next.

Never in my life have I been SO excited as when I realized that I was looking at the four-toed statue. Not for LONG, but still! I am pretty sure I scared 2 of the 3 people I watch Lost with . . . I really, really hope we see more of that time period, and that this wasn’t supposed to be “our answer” that we have to be satisfied with. Josh thinks the statue looks very Egyptian, which makes sense given the hieroglyphics on the Temple and in the Swan station; specifically, he wonders if it could be a statue of Horus, which would be interesting given the character Horace that we’ve seen time and time again, and that the statue might be, like Horus is usually depicted, holding an ankh, like the one that belongs to Amy’s first husband Paul. This is beginning to feel an awful lot like Stargate . . .

Originally, this week’s episode and last week’s were to be shown in the reverse order. Apparently, the network execs thought this episode was just so good they wanted to save it. This gave me pretty high hopes for tonight’s episode! In the end, I liked it, but I didn’t love it — it was more set up for the future, which I like a lot, but beyond that it left me with tons of new questions. It would have been so disorienting, I think, for the episodes to be switched; at the beginning of this episode, for instance, Ilana tells Locke that “the pilot and some woman” took one of the boats to get to the “other” Island (which is the original Lost Island — flight 316 has crashed on the Island that Kate and Sawyer were kept captive on), and with the episodes in this order we know that means Lapidus and, I’d guess, Sun. I think this provided a great framing device for the episode, and I’m happy to have watched it in this sequence.

The episode opens on Jack’s eye, just like the very first episode. And many episodes in the first season opened like this, on the eye of the character whose flashback we’d be seeing that night, until they eventually dropped that particular “rule.” The way he’s lying on his back, shellshocked, reminded me instantly of the way Ben appeared when he timetraveled into the Sahara at the end of last season.

UPDATE: The Get Lost Podcast shows a comparison between Jack in the first episode and Jack in “316″. A lot of attention to detail was paid! Katie pointed out that the “big” difference is that Jack’s tie is still askew, but going in the wrong direction. That seems like a clue to me, going along with my theory that something is sort of “off” about this particular trip and this plane “crash” (if that’s what it is). I don’t think they would spend so much time carefully recreating the outfit, the lighting, the shots, and then get this detail wrong if it weren’t on purpose. As Eloise Hawking said, if the flight wasn’t as close as possible to the original 815, the results could be “unpredictable.”

For a long while, none of us were sure whether we could believe, or not, that the Losties were really back on the Island. I’m absolutely shocked that they’re back on the Island so soon in the season, since I really believed they weren’t going to be arriving until the season finale. I guess the pace is going to be even more frantic than I expected! The episode’s title, “316,” seems important, since it’s the flight number but isn’t made up of “the numbers” (16 is okay, but 3 isn’t one of them); it seems to be telling us, in some way, that this is like the flight of 815, and like the original sequence of events, but not quite — something is off.

What an episode! I’m sure there’s going to be lots of easter eggs and discussion popping up over the next few days, so be sure to check back here for updates. Looking at this episode on the highest level, the title is incredibly ominous. But it could mean so many things, and refer to various theories that people have been talking about for years. Can we see people like Christian Shepherd and Taller Ghost Walt because this place is, in some literal sense, death? The producers have assured us that the Island is not purgatory, but could it be some more complicated boundary between life and death? Or is the title a reference to a fate that is inescapable, no matter how hard you fight it, like Charlotte and Daniel? Regardless, I think this was a fantastic episode, striking a great balance between giving us answers and keeping us on the edge of our seats.

The episode tonight was sort of split into two parts: Rousseau’s crew for the first portion, and everyone else for the rest. It was tough to watch Rousseau’s crew, especially when they are being kind to Jin, knowing what was going to happen to them and to Danielle herself, and that it’s not going to be pretty. I really had no idea the time scale would be so short, though! Last week, when these guys showed up, everyone on the forums was pointing out our prior knowledge that Montand at some point would lose his arms, but it came so soon, and fell apart so quickly. No wonder she completely lost her mind. Young Danielle is so adorable, so sweet, and they could have made her harsh if they’d chosen to. The next twenty years of her life are difficult; this casting, and this exploration of her story, was really effective. One of the things I liked a lot about the scenes where they’re trying to escape the smoke monster was that they echoed some of the techniques you needed to use in the Lost: Via Domus tie-in PC game. It’s always nice to know that the ridiculous amounts of time I invest in this show aren’t wasted!