It was what it was, and some of us feel that it wasn’t what it used to be.

Let’s not fight! If you loved it, I’m not going to be able to convince you that you shouldn’t have, and trust me, you’re not going to be able to convince me to love it as the end to the series I’ve been watching (though standing on its own, you could maybe suck me in — I mean, Vincent lying down with Jack was like a punch in the gut; I’m not made of stone). There’s no point in having that conversation and it just turning into a hate fest.

And, of course, there’s the question of what really happened there: was the flash-sideways what happened to everyone in some kind of purgatory? Or was it Jack’s fantasy, his own personal purgatory, of what would have happened in the perfect world, and it only resolved with everyone being able to move on once he became willing to let go of those attempts to fix everything, all of his regrets? There’s some wiggle room there, and what actually happened isn’t completely clear, so we can agree to disagree — and even change our minds with time.

But.

There’s definitely one thing I think needs to be said about this as our destination, and that is this: it is basically impossible to think of any story you’ve ever read, or watched, or heard, that couldn’t have ended this way. It would certainly be easier, less wrenching, less challenging, if at the end of Casablanca we knew that this was not “goodbye,” but “see you later”; if Hamlet got to sit down with his father, apologize for taking so long to act, and work it all out; if Gatsby and Daisy had a single afterlife to look forward to sharing after their separate lives; if it didn’t really matter whether Westley saved Buttercup, since there’s always the post-purgatory reunion to count on.

There are very few exceptions, I think, to that line of argument, and most of those exceptions either actually did end this way, or ended in some other “tricky,” it-was-all-a-dream kind of way (St. Elsewhere, for instance). That is, if you accept this trope as an option, you can always have the ending you want, and the ending can always be the same. Sometimes, however, there is beauty in the imperfect. Sometimes, we can say that this is why we have literature, a culture, a set of shared traditions and memes: because that is what we have to work with. Do-overs for everyone? Definitely appealing, for myriad reasons, reasons I don’t need to explain to you. If you liked this ending because it reminded you of something else, that’s great, but there are clear reasons for that: it’s an old, old, old story.

Given that, I’m not sure that the question really is, “Was this cool, or was it completely ridiculous and unrelated to the series as a whole?” That’s where we’ll disagree, and stand divided on opposite sides of this line, no matter what. But I think there is a larger question here: if there is a cultural option that exists, an ending to trump all endings (and all beginnings, and all middles), and this ending can be invoked even casually to put a tale back on a happy path after death and digressions have taken it elsewhere, what happens to our storytelling if we use that ending? How drastic is it to invoke that silver bullet? What, then, is the function of our storytelling? Do we want Daisy to leave Tom and run off with Jay Gatsby, simply because that’s not as sad? Why don’t all stories end this way? What does it mean when one does?

There has been a lot of chatter about how people who loved the characters would like this finale, and that you’d only be disappointed if you thought this show was about the plot. And that, I think, is a pretty reductionist argument and a completely false dichotomy. It ignores all nuance, all other options, all questions of whether there is a point to telling a story that ends with “Nevermind! All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” I cared a lot about these characters! I just happen to think that there is more than one goal for character development, and that there are far more options for what constitutes a happy ending than what seemed allowable here. If you grow, and change, and process your daddy issues and your torturing people issues and your Jacob issues, a noble death is not the only worthy redemption. There is something to be said for actually applying your growth, your positive changes, to your actual life, to the people who are around you and who care about you, who need, and in not waiting for some ultimate ending where suddenly none of those mistakes matter. There’s something to be said for the work of a person in changing her life, and there’s something to be said for the work of a writer in getting us there.

It is easy to find redemption in a world with a guaranteed ‘happy’ ending. It is difficult when you live on an Island where monsters are trying to kill you, starve you, psychologically torture you, tear you apart.

That is not — I refuse to believe — an issue of me “not understanding” that Lost is about characters. Loving characters, like loving actual people, is about the actual thread of relationships, not the immateriality and inconsequentiality of the details of those threads. Trust me: I’m not enraged because I “didn’t get answers” or some other issue of “not getting what the writers were going for.” I get it. But it wasn’t where they started, and it wasn’t where they took us, and there is a line between “The ultimate questions on this show aren’t about science fiction” and “Most of what you watched had no bearing on the ultimate questions.” And there is a line between “a show about characters developing and growing” and “a show where the happy ending comes before characters apply the lessons they’ve learned.”

There’s also, of course, no way to separate plot and characters, so to say that those of us who were interested in the mystery were “missing the point” is to, well, miss a large part of our point. Mysteries are fascinating because they have effects on character, and because there’s something terrifying or confusing or amazing or beautiful about forces you can’t explain which nevertheless act upon you. What happened on the Island was, yes, quite often very sci-fi in its elements, but there’s a reason that sci-fi has its own tropes: these questions of Why can’t women on the Island become mothers? and Why was Walt considered so very special? and How does Jacob protect you? and Was Ben ever following orders, or was he a homicidal egomaniac the entire time? are, of course, about “character” as much as they are about “plot.”

More succinctly, the issue isn’t not getting answers. I didn’t want “an explanation” of the Island, because how could that ever have been satisfying? I’m not, for example, complaining about not knowing what happened next to Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Lapidus, Miles, and Richard — that’s how life works, after all: people don’t have nice, neat little endings after something television-worthy happens to them. What they did with the Island, leaving it a bit open, was cool, and like real life where you don’t actually get cut-and-dried meanings all the time — why didn’t they also do that with the idea of redemption? Why make it so open-and-shut, you-must-believe-this-or-the-show-has-been-a-waste? The issue is being handed (and I use that word deliberately, because it’s so easy to tell your audience that this is how your fictional universe works rather than to show us consistently over a number of years) one ultimate answer to end all answers. Lack of answers? Not the same as directly contradictory answers.

The issue I take is with being told, directly and indirectly, that the picky details matter — that you need to see the Dharma label on the shark, that you need to play the audio backwards to hear Ghost Walt say “Don’t push the button, the button’s bad,” that you need to participate in the summer internet game and buy a copy of Bad Twin in order to have the full story and understand the Hanso foundation, that you need to know that a bird shouted Hurley’s name in the jungle one time — for six years, and then having the answer literally be “You shouldn’t care about those answers, just THIS answer.”

Melissa McEwan says all of this very, very well:

The emphasis on explaining the sideways timeline seemed disproportionate…? It was presented almost like a resolution to the whole show, but it was really just some tangential plot arc that ultimately doesn’t matter to the main story, unless you’re someone who wants to know what happened to all the characters after they died.

We could have had a happy ending without having — and you know what I mean here — The Ultimate Happy Ending. And we could have had this ending at any point; you can make the ending to any story, “And then they died, but went to an afterlife and lived happily ever after,” and it doesn’t matter at all what came before. When you’ve written a beginning and a middle that don’t lead to your end, and an ending that could be written in precisely the same way regardless of what you wrote before it, you have not written a tale, you have placed your characters in a circumstance.

The “everyone gets a do-over” happy ending is, to me, totally cheesy. You can disagree! But I also am not particularly sure that I can get on board that this was a happy ending for everyone. The actual, real Aaron, who is a person, doesn’t get the same agency as Claire? Boone, because his character was never paired off in the time before the writers wrote out his character, has to hang out in heaven all alone but Sayid and Shannon who went out for, what, two weeks, are apparently the greatest love story ever told? If I ever conquer a smoke monster and discover that my reward is an eternity with someone I may have had a crush on for a few weeks back in the late 90s, I’m going to be an unhappy camper.

At some point, the entire internet decided not to even think about Purgatory as an option. Thinking that something purgative was going on became the joke you made about noobs. And so it never occurred to me that the flash sideways was some kind of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe Sixth Sense Titanic What Dreams May Come Purgatory Star Wars Matrix deus ex machina. It simply didn’t come up! Nobody was going to say the purgatory word.

I’m also not really a big fan of the love story that doesn’t involve any work, where people are just Meant To Be Together and it doesn’t matter how they actually behave or treat each other once that has been decreed by an author, a creator. In what universe is it more important how you are placed and arranged in the world than how you treat the people with whom you share it?

Amy put it to me very well, I think: it turned out that being on an Island, an Island that attracts transport vessels of all kinds, where there is time travel and zombification and an evil syndicate of scientific researchers and a Frozen Donkey Wheel which, when turned, dumps you in Tunisia, and a temple, and two immortal beings who sometimes make their friends immortal too, and whispers and apparitions in the woods? That was the real, everyday, normal world, so the details don’t really matter — just distractions on the way to an afterlife. The supernatural part was Jack having a normal life with a kid, a career, and a decided lack of substance abuse. What are we to take from that? Is it a commentary on our need for stories, our use of science fiction, our cultural narrative in which we are all embedded? Or was it not actually a high-level commentary at all, and rather just a way out of a twisted story with no possible resolution?

I’m not saying that there wasn’t a single moment that I liked, or that I wasn’t smiling for much of the 2.5 hours, or that Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson don’t rock, or that I’m not totally in love with the explanation that Eloise is choosing to draw things out so that she can have more time with Daniel, or that everything was a waste of time. That wouldn’t be fair of me. All I ask is the same consideration in return: I’m not going to dwell, in picayune detail, on every moment that might have been cool or nice or a wonderful, long time coming, when the ultimate message I was asked to accept was that, “Don’t worry! Don’t be sad! Eventually, anything you lose comes back to you.”

And, of course, I’m not going to say that everything makes perfect sense even if you do accept this last-minute framing device — why does Desmond get to “decide” when, say, Jack is ready to move on to his own afterlife, but that Ana Lucia and Daniel aren’t? If it’s your afterlife, and you have to decide when your ready, why does Kate get to literally point you in the direction of your dead father? Beyond that, I truly and honestly think that in some cases — Kate and Jack, Juliet and Sawyer — we’re supposed to agree, “Yes, of course they were the most important people in each other’s lives, and this is a fitting companionship for a daytrip to heaven” — and in the cases where it doesn’t make sense — Shannon and Sayid (maybe – I know people might disagree), Locke and Helen, the existence of Ji Yeon and Desmond and Penny’s little Charlie, etc. — we’re seriously being asked to pretend not to notice. Is there a real, physical person named David who ever exists? If not, what a cruel joke on Jack and Juliet who now have to live in eternity without him, and if so why was he hanging out with Juliet and Jack in purgatory instead of with whoever his actual parents are? Did they really even commit to this storyline with the whole oh-seriously-it-could-be-ANY-spirituality-for-realsies-please-believe-us-and-don’t-be-offended copout (by the way, if you are with me on the anti-finale train, I highly suggest checking out the Lifetime, Wow! entry on the finale which contains a spot-on joke about Jack and a Prius)? Why was Kate’s life, Sayid’s life, in the purgatory stage so similar to their real lives, but other characters’ were so different? What is so different about what happened with Michael that leaves him “stuck” on the Island while others move on (I mean, I get that he did bad things, but are those things that different from Ben? Sayid? KEAMY? Juliet before she became one of the Losties? The only difference I can see is that Harold Perrineau left the show)? If the whole “flash-sideways” was actually an in-between world that existed only for the characters, and only for them to work things out and pass to the other side, then, um, why were we shown the Island at the bottom of the ocean in the premiere, which, first of all, had no bearing on the characters and, secondly, doesn’t really make sense in a narrative framing device where there’s no third-person omniscience? And really, honestly, the electromagnetism thing that has framed the entire show from beginning to almost-end had no significance, only somehow Desmond’s powers are related both to that and to being able to hop back and forth from the afterlife?

When I watch it again, I’ll be happy for the happy ending, because that does serve a purpose for the audience, if not (in my opinion) for the story. For my last entry, I want to end simply. Thank you for reading. This might be the best way to go out, and to capture what it is that I think just happened.

I won’t be blogging the final episode as quickly as I usually do, because I’ll have a late night and a houseful of people — and by tomorrow, speed-blogging will be the last thing Lost can possibly require. I’ll try to get to it later in the day on Monday. But, hopefully, we’ll have some answers and closure and there won’t be too much to say, other than a thumbs up or a thumbs down (accompanied by screaming and the sound of a Jears piñata being savagely beaten).

As you may have noticed, the media is pretty much saturated with Lost news and links and videos these days. Here’s some of the best of what I’ve been able to find:

• Here are some amazing (and some creepy) Lost fan tributes. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which might sound like good ideas to me.
• Lost cakes on Cake Wrecks.
• Unnecessary Censorship of Lost scenes (not for moms. It’s definitely cool for MY mom, though).
• I’ll Never Be Lost Again> on YouTube.
• Not to end on a sour note, but here’s some major news about Ilana and a Lost mystery that they just apparently ran out of time to address.

So, tonight, have fun, drive safe, live together die alone, don’t forget to lift it up, and don’t tell me what I can’t do.

Anyway, first, some business: this weekend! They’re re-airing the series premiere on Saturday night from 8 to 10 (come on up if you’re interested), then Sunday is a clip show from 7 to 9 (during which I suggest a round of Jackface), finale from 9 to 11:30, local news from 11:30 to 12 (a.k.a. Jears piñata time at my place), and then live interviews with the cast and creators on Jimmy Kimmel until 1 a.m.

It turns out even 2.5 hours isn’t enough for the finale, and there’s going to be an extra 20 minutes (which would basically be an extra full half hour on television) on the DVD. My coworkers think that if the finale is awful (and since the season pretty much has been) that we should all boycott the DVDs, but hopefully they saw the look of panic on my face and know that I just cannot do that.

More fun stuff: an interview with Damon and Carlton about how much everyone hated the previous episode, “Across the Sea,” and how it’s not their fault that the show we’ve been watching is apparently not the show they’ve been writing; videos of some of the cast interviewing each other; and, finally, a couple of sets of photos from a huge event they had on Hawaii over the weekend (where they actually aired the episode we are watching as I type this). Mainly these photos are fun because Taller Ghost Walt is now HOLY GUACAMOLE Ghost Walt.

And then the episode opens with Jack X’s eye opening in LA, which is totally Sam’s prediction for how the entire series is going to end (the eye part, not the LA part — her vote is for the Island). So, either they ran that this week to tease us that the series will not be ending that way — kind of an “it’s NOT purgatory!” inside joke — or it was supposed to be a reminder so that next week we’ll remember seeing it. Hmmm.

I’m on board with people remembering the original timeline, but how does Jack keep ending up bleeding in the X Universe? Does anyone have any ideas that can make that particular twist make sense? Jack X and David are so adorable! They are really pretty much bashing us over the head with that (and with the whole “WHO IS THE MOM?!? OMGWTFBBQ?!?” question). Later when Locke X says that David looks just like Jack, he says, “Don’t tell him that!” Um, why? Why would a kid not want to look like Matthew Fox? Say what you will about Jack and what a ridiculous tool he is — and I have said that, a lot — but don’t tell me you don’t like watching him.

He’s stitching up Kate just like she stitched him up way back in the beginning! Awwww. Are they winning me back? And then she decides to kill Flocke! And then Desmond X beats the living daylights out of Ben X! And we see Miles and Richard and Ben again, FINALLY! And since we last saw them, they have been having excellent adventures! And Widmore always calls Ben “Benjamin”! And someone rescued Desmond from the well and we have no idea who! And Jack actually says the words, “I’ve been wrong before”!!! Wow, that’s a lot of exclamation points, especially compared to what we’ve had lately (namely, my bitterness and lots of question marks). Perhaps they HAVE won me back! Hopefully this is more enjoyable for you to read than the last few weeks have been.

You know what’s going to be really awkward if Ben X starts remembering his Island life? He’s going to become convinced that one of his AP History students is his daughter. Which is a little extra creepy, no?

So Desmond X’s plan is accelerating a bit now. It’s about time! Sounds like Jacob’s is too: “We’re very close to the end, Hugo.” Oh, Jacob, this is why you’re my favorite character on this show — wait, you’re brand new and a huge distraction from the stuff I actually love. Slip of the tongue!

Aaaaaaaaand there goes Richard. That was quick! Wait, what about the rules? If Flocke could kill Richard, why wouldn’t he have done that some point in the last couple of hundred years? Is it because Richard isn’t protected by Jacob anymore? Seriously, how do these rules work?? I wonder whether they’re ever going to show us Smokey actually turning into Flocke — I can’t tell whether we’re supposed to be thinking that’s a huge mystery we’ll get to see happen in the next couple of hours, or if it’s more a question of not having the budget to do a good job with the special effects and we’re just supposed to imagine it being somewhat like Clark Kent.

Fact: hardcore Island Rousseau with the guns and the guns is way cooler than fancy coq au vin Rousseau X with the bangs and the dress and the looking like maybe she wants to make out with Ben. Also, Dear Lost: a parent would never say “You’re the closest thing to a father she’s ever had” to a teacher they are just meeting for the first time. Yeah, because teaching AP history is totally like being a single mom!

Flocke killed Island Liz Lemon! Love this guy. Isn’t Terry O’Quinn just great? From SpaceCamp to Lost, I think I’ll stick with him. And remember a few weeks ago when I thought Ben was totally beaten down into submission and had lost all his spirit? Yeah, this is way, way better. Not that I’m really jazzed about the whole “Penny dying” aspect of this, but the “Ben killing everyone” thing could be fun. And let’s be honest: redemption stories can be cool, but a really fantastic villain is a terrible thing to waste. Also: Widmore says he’s been three steps ahead of Ben, and he says that he was going to blow the plane up, but if you’re really, really trying to keep someone from escaping from the Island, don’t you use your C4 immediately?

Wait wait wait is Kate a candidate again? Oh Lost, thank you! I knew the whole “Austen was crossed out in the cave, but not in the lighthouse” thing couldn’t be an error (um, but it’s a good thing Widmore didn’t shoot her — and so much for ‘the rules’: if you can just volunteer to be a candidate, why would Smokey be so hell-bent on taking out some specific subset of them?). I love that they just sit down around a fire and Jacob finally says one thing that I actually have been waiting to hear: none of them were doing okay in their lives. I mean, you have to ignore the dozens and dozens of other people on Oceanic 815 who died in the crash, and people like Sayid who was on his way to a reunion with Nadia, but at this stage in the game we’re assumed to be pretty good at ignoring the parts of Lost we’re supposed to ignore. I didn’t love his attitude that this meant they had no reason to complain about coming to this awful place and having even more terrible things happen to them, but at least we’re getting one answer that fits in with what we suspected all along.

I’m not really sure that I have any capability to understand why Kate “becoming a mother” means crossing her name out, but, um, you know, WHATEVER, Lost. She’s too delicate of a flower for Jacob to drag her to the Island because she’s a mom? Only he did anyway, but because of his ‘principles’ he wasn’t doing it for a good reason and was really just wasting her time and risking her life? This is why sexism doesn’t actually make good sense. Also, there was still a Kwon up on that ceiling, so either this rule didn’t apply to Sun (doubtful) or this rule doesn’t apply to fathers (ding ding ding). On the other hand, Jacob makes Jack cry bitter Jears, so that’s pretty sweet. You win some, you lose some.

Hurley: “I’m just glad it’s not me.” Pffft! We were all hoping you were gonna have a really awesome ending, so this had better not mean that you don’t! Along the same lines, I’m not exactly sure how this is progress. Jacob says that he pulled everyone out of pretty miserable lives into a situation that would help them change, and I’m with him as far as that (pretty major theme) goes. But Jack started off this show being a guy who just had to fix things no matter what and wouldn’t let anybody else in — how, exactly, is him volunteering to chain himself to an Island for the rest of his miserable existence a step forward??

You know, I can’t help but thinking how last week’s episode wouldn’t have driven me as completely nuts if it hadn’t aired last week. It’s not like I’m sitting here saying, “Wow, Jacob just asked Jack to drink from the cup just like Mother did way back in the third season!” It doesn’t count as a mystery if we found out about it seven days ago. I really think they would have been a lot wiser to incorporate those threads much, much earlier.

On the other hand, though, this episode didn’t waste any time. We all knew Jack was going to be The Candidate, and they rushed us through that and through him drinking from the cup pretty quickly so that we can get to the action. And the water wasn’t even turned into wine, thank you very much. I appreciate that, because if someone had asked me to bet, I would have thought we were going to have an hour of Jack angst with him deciding whether or not to drink and hemming and hawing and crying in the jungle, and we didn’t have to deal with any of that. It’s over, Jack is going to stick around to protect the Island (or die trying — guess we’ll find out Sunday!), and now all that’s left is the endgame. Also, I guess I had just assumed that we would not find out who Jacob’s replacement would be until the very, very end (even though we all “knew” it would be Jack), but I like this way better. It’s definitely set up so that Sawyer, Hurley, and Kate can each have a major role to play and a good ending to their story even without being The One True Protector Of The Magic Golden Cave, and that’s better news than I was expecting. In other words, being The Candidate doesn’t, we now know, necessarily mean being the best or the brightest or the favorite or the one who contributes the most — this is a role Jack is taking, but it’s not diminishing what the others can do in the next 2.5 hours.

Ana-Lucia X as a crooked cop is the best possible reinvention for her. Hurley X in cahoots with Desmond X is the best possible reinvention for him. And now they’re all going to go to a concert to hang out with David and Pierre Chang and we’ll finally find out who David’s mother is and maybe it will be Juliet (that’s the going theory, though if having intense experiences with someone you knew on the Island makes you remember the other timeline, how would that not have already happened?) and somehow having them all in the same place is going to save the Island and it’s gonna be AWESOME. And Desmond is a failsafe and is somehow going to destroy the Island which doesn’t actually sound like a bad thing to me. Next week is just going to be everybody trying to kill everybody, including Ben being back with a vengeance (and, we hope, maybe double or triple crossing — you never can tell with that guy). This is much, much better, no?

Are you excited? I’M SO EXCITED. This weekend I won’t be blogging during the finale, so that means you’ll need to wait a little bit longer for discussion — but, at that point, there won’t be much to discuss other than love or hate. Fingers crossed. For now, I leave you with Ack’s Ode to Lost, which reminds us of a simpler time when Lost wasn’t about an epic battle of good and evil and was a bit more about the Hurley Bird and Scott and Steve.

On a rewatch of “The Candidate,” I also noticed that Claire X told Jack X that she had never met her father, Christian. In the original timeline, she met him when he showed up to pay for her mother’s private care after the car accident Claire caused — so it seems that one of the differences in this timeline might be that Claire’s mom was never in that accident.

And finally, I read something really interesting this week that helped me put my finger on what, exactly, bugged me about the way Sayid died. Damon and Carlton have been trying to say that, by sacrificing himself to save others, Sayid finally managed to redeem himself. Two problems with that: first, Sayid was a zombie — dude was dead for two hours! How’s that supposed to work? But secondly, Sayid didn’t need to be redeemed to us. We already knew that he was a really, really good guy. If you get to pick five items to take to a deserted island, one of them should be Sayid. The person who didn’t know that was Sayid himself — and that’s why his story needed closure. Not so that we would see him in a different light, but so that he would see himself the way everyone else already does.

I honestly think they are currently skipping “Previously, on Lost . . . ” because they need those 30 seconds to try to wrap this thing up in the next 4.5 hours. Yeah: four point five hours.

Allison Janney! Amazing! She’s been great almost as long as Terry O’Quinn (she used to be adorable in NYS Lottery commercials, of which my mother and I have, for some reason, extremely vivid memories). Oh, and of course Jacob and Flocke are twins. So original! Which one do you think is the evil one? And why would the Enemy go around telling people that he used to just be a normal man with a life until he came to the Island? That sounds like, um, BS, and I’m so glad that we only had 19 hours of Lost this season and got to spend a bunch of them thinking, for absolutely no discernible reason, that Flocke got trapped on the Island. At least we definitely understand why he tells people that he had a crazy mother.

So in just a few minutes, Lost has turned into a combination of Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Blue Lagoon. With a dash of immortality. That’s totally what I expected to happen! And then a little bit later, you have some magic goodness that everybody wants to have and some badness that can’t be left off the Island, so now there’s a dash of A Wrinkle In Time thrown in. Hey, didn’t this show used to be about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and their relationships and growth as human beings? No, just me?

And is the idea that Allison Janney really NEVER gave the second baby a name? Or were they just going crazy nutso out of their way to keep from saying it? Because, you know, whatever this name is, I don’t see how it could possibly be good enough to justify jumping through all these hoops.

OK, so crazy Allison Janney went to a magical glowing stream and . . . made it so that Jacob and the Enemy can never hurt each other and never need to worry about death? Hey, dear Lost: If the question is “How did they get their power? How did they become immortal?” then “Because of MAGIC” isn’t an answer. Sorry, there’s a little bit of this light inside every man? It’s “the source”? You go too close to the light and it turns you into a monster made of smoke? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to tell us nothing, which is basically the same thing as invoking magic? We’re not actually gaining anything when that is the kind of information we’re getting — what’s the difference between not knowing something and being told the thing is unknowable? What’s the difference between, “There’s a donkey wheel stuck at the bottom of a well, and turning it harnesses the Island’s special properties and makes you time travel,” which we’ve known for years, and “There’s a donkey wheel stuck at the bottom of a well because The Enemy somehow figured out with his ‘clever’ ancient buddies that putting it there would allow him to take over the Island’s power and escape by mixing the water and the light,” which we only learned tonight? How is that progress? Can you not see how those are the same thing? And what, Widmore is trying to take over the Island — just like everyone else has — so that he can get at, um, the most beautiful light anyone has ever seen? Naturally! Tesseract!

Best line on Lost, ever: “I have no idea because you wouldn’t tell me.” Yeah, I wonder how that would feel. Hammiest line on Lost, ever: “Please. Take the cup and drink.” Yup. They went there. They also seem to be setting things up for us to be convinced that, uh, science is evil, and it may shock you but that’s not a message I can get behind: Flocke wants to leave the Island “just because” there’s a whole world to explore out there, and his friends who are also interested in doing that are ‘bad’ and not like CJ Cregg and her folks. If you think about it, you can connect this line of thinking to a lot of what’s been happening lately, and I find it interesting that what used to be a sci-fi show with lots of time travel seems to be going down this road. Battlestar Galactica, anyone?

So how did Allison Janney kill all those people and fill in that well all by her lonesome? Was she supposed to be Smokey, thus the ability to wipe out a village, and that’s how she knew that going into the tunnel meant a fate worse than death? Or was it more that she was in the role of protecting the Island, knew that eternal life was a raw deal, and was pretty jazzed to dump that job on Jacob and then thank the other twin for killing her? And also, why did she randomly love Kid Who’s Not Jacob more than Jacob? I get what that accomplishes in the story, but, you know, how do you motivate that? And if Allison Janney only told Jacob and Not Jacob what we saw her tell them, and then she died, how does Jacob know any of the other junk that, by 2007, he seems to know? How did she know any of this jazz? And if the kids were already immortal, as she implied when she told them they didn’t need to worry about death, what exactly is so much “worse than death” about being turned into Smoke? I mean, if you are already trapped on an Island and are already not going to be able to die, what’s so much worse about spending some of that time in the form of smoke? And how does the Enemy end up back in that body, running around the Island, harassing Richard and wanting to kill Jacob?

Oh, and don’t even try to tell me that Allison Janney and Jacob’s Dead Brother were always supposed to be Adam and Eve (right, that’s why Jack said that the bodies had been there for about 50 years — because they’d actually been there, undisturbed and undeteriorated, for hundreds). I was born at night, but not last night. And they even showed us a little clip of Jack and Kate finding them in the caves 6 years ago, because apparently NOW all of the sudden Lost isn’t expecting us to have paid even the tiniest bit of attention. Hey, Lost: I saw the Dharma logo on that shark. You’re not impressing me. And I was also around when you promised that the reveal of Adam and Eve would convince me that you’d had this idea in mind the whole time. Really? How is this supposed to convince me of that?

This reminded me a lot of the Richard episode: yes, we got backstory, but not the part of the backstory that we needed for everything to make sense. In Richard’s case, yes, we needed to know how he ended up working for Jacob, but also what his life traveling on and off the Island was like, and what his actual function was, and how much he knew at any given time. In this case, yes, we needed to know the Jacob and Twin origin story, and how one ended up a Smoke Monster, but we also needed to know what being the Smoke Monster meant to him, and how this turned into an epic struggle of destiny versus free will, and how Jacob relates to a Man in Black who looks like his brother even though he knows he killed his brother and laid him to rest, and why leaving the Island needs to happen in a certain way, and why the rules are the rules. That’s the heart of what we needed to learn tonight. And were the Enemy’s people the original Others? Did anyone come before them? Who is more responsible for the Island we know today — their influence, or Jacob’s? Why couldn’t we have learned some of what they knew about the Island, given that they seem to have learned and earned it rather than having it handed to them on a platter by a nutjob?

Honestly, I went into this with the goal of not coming off as crazed and bitter as last week. But then . . . this happened. I give up! Seriously, think about EVERYTHING that has been significant for 6 years. Think about what you always thought were the “big mysteries” behind Lost. Did any of those have anything to do with the ash, or time travel, or the difference between destiny and free will, or whether it’s better to be a man of science or a man of faith, or who is good and who is “bad”, or how you end up on “the list” that the Others keep, or the whispers, or dead people appearing in the woods (remember Harper? I thought I was the only one who did until last weekend, and that’s a ‘clue’ that went NOWHERE), or the protective power of the temple, or who the guy was who said “Help me” to Locke in Jacob’s cabin that time, or the sickness, or why women can’t give birth, or why Aaron couldn’t be raised by another, or why Walt seemed to be so special at first but not later, or why the Others branded Juliet, or why Dharma originally came to the Island, or who settled it originally, or why the giant foot statue has four toes, or what the Island’s power is, or even what “You’re special” means in the context of the show (which came up tonight, so 1 point to Across the Sea), or what “Lift it up” means, or what Locke saw way back when he said he looked into the heart of the Island and “it was beautiful”, or why he was drawing pictures of the Smoke Monster when he was just a little boy and Richard came to interview him? Probably. Did any of those have anything to do with finding out that CJ Cregg used to know lots about the Island and that there is a magical glowing cave of magic that is magical and somehow explains everything? I’m guessing no.

And while we are getting some ‘answers,’ I suppose, it does seem that the writers are answering our questions in a very literal way. “How does Jacob know about the Island’s power?” can be answered, “His mother told him,” but that only answers the letter of the question, not the spirit — the writers know full well that what we actually meant was, “How could anyone understand the Island’s power?”

There are a couple of things I’m NOT going to complain about, though! How thrilling for you! Anyway, lots of blogs and forums this morning are wondering how CJ Cregg and The Boys’ Actual Mom “learned English” or “switched to English” all of the sudden in that opening scene. Just to clear that up: they didn’t. The writers just had the actors switch over to English so that we didn’t have to read subtitles for an entire episode, and they did it with a flourish of music which is pretty much the ‘accepted’ way to make that kind of move on television. All indications are that this episode takes place 2,000 years ago: that wasn’t English-as-a-clue, it was just a convenience for us as viewers.

I also think it’s supercool that the boys were playing an ancient game, the rules of which we actually don’t know.

Also, they did a really good job, at least, of demonstrating that both Jacob and Jacob’s Dead Brother (I’m really struggling with nicknames this week — somebody’s gotta do Sawyer’s job these days) are sympathetic characters and both came from a reasonable place. Of course Jacob attacked his Evil Twin — Evil Twin killed their mother. Of course Evil Twin killed CJ Cregg — she torched his village. At least now I can continue being convinced that neither of them is “the good guy.” That’s the silver lining, maybe? Is that a stretch?

There’s so much more I could say, about unreliable narrators, about how sometimes leaving something a mystery is actually more informative than a nonsensical answer, and how sometimes these nonsensical answers actually undermine some things that we previously thought were really cool, about how I never thought I’d miss Jack, but I’ll leave all that as an exercise for the reader.

Other fun stuff: the night before the finale, Saturday May 22nd, ABC is going to air a special version of the original two-hour pilot. So, obviously, my apartment will be available for anyone who’s interested! And if you’re wondering why the preview for next week’s episode only seemed to show stuff from previous seasons, that’s because Damon and Carlton are so afraid of giving too much away that there aren’t going to be any more promos with new material between now and the finale.

Oh Locke X is alive! I am SO RELIEVED. I’m starting this episode about 40 minutes late because I just spent 2 hours telling people all about how the world isn’t going to end in 2012 (clearly, the world ends on May 23rd as soon as the finale of Lost airs). So, I have a lot of pent-up energy, and I thiiiiiink that’s going to come through in this very bitter blog post.

Well, I guess we have our final confirmation that Kate isn’t on any lists and isn’t interesting in any way whatsoever, so I suppose we can get back to placing bets as to whether she’ll make out with Sawyer or Jack next since that’s all this stupid show cares about.

Oh Jack X, look at you trying to fix people, also known as “bending them to your will since, after all, the world revolves around you.” And then Bernard X adorably says, “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” which we all know is impossible because Jack will never be satisfied. He is, however, always pretty adorable with his son, and later on in this episode with Claire X (and what do YOU all think that music box means?).

Flocke tells Jack he can trust him “because I could kill you,” but didn’t. Um, how does that make any logical sense, especially given that Jack has spent YEARS living a horrible existence where people use allegiances and emotion and false feelings of security to do horrible things to people? If I’m on Lost Island, and someone tells me they’re not going to kill me, I don’t assume it’s because they’re my best buddy; I assume it’s because they’re going to use me in some awful way. And, given that I’m a woman, they’re probably going to use me to get to Jack. Or Sawyer, take your pick. If I’m Jack, and Flocke says this to me, I don’t buy it for a minute — fortunately, Jack does seem to figure out later in the episode that there’s something strange going on, thinks about how Richard can’t kill himself but can have others kill him, puts two and two together, and comes up with a totally bizarre idea that turns out to be correct.

However, I am indeed wondering why it is that Flocke is always claiming to need help from people. Perhaps in this case he really just needs Jack’s psychological help, to convince people to follow him. But generally, he seems very concerned with gaining “followers,” which seems strange to me given that, lacking ash circles and sonic fences, he seems to have an unlimited ability to kill.

And I know Jack rescued them, so obviously Kate, Sawyer, the Kwons, and the rest of the crew are going to follow him at first — at least until they are safely out of the cages. But why would they continue to follow him when it becomes clear that they’re going back to Locke? Sawyer just hatched an elaborate plan to get away from him. I know there is no point in trying to figure out the logic of this show, so I just want to make sure you’re all with me in WTF-land. And why doesn’t Sawyer question Flocke’s explanation that Widmore is just trying to get them all in the same place to kill them? He knows full well that Widmore could have killed them all. I know he doesn’t want to tip his hand in front of Locke, but even when he’s talking to Jack, he just sort of vaguely says “I don’t trust him.” He doesn’t say, “This doesn’t make sense because Widmore could easily kill us. He won’t because he apparently needs us. Also, that bomb on the plane was REALLY OBVIOUS, so I think maybe Widmore WANTED Flocke to find it. As in, I’m totally sure.” Oh, actually, that last bit’s just me, not Sawyer. Unless, of course, that C4 was the result of Ben, Richard, and Miles’s trip to try to blow the plane up. Why wouldn’t they just have detonated immediately, though? On the other hand, why would Widmore have precisely the same plan as our favorite sarcastic trio?

Dear Lost: We get that the X Losties are remembering stuff from the other timeline. Having Locke X mutter, “Don’t push the button” is pushing it a bit far, wouldn’t you agree? However, I am really enjoying that Jack X is figuring out that there are too many coincidences here for them to be nothing more than coincidences. I think they’re playing that really well, since it’s taking him a while to put it all together and he’s having genuine interactions with these people in the meantime. On the other hand, what is it that Claire X is actually doing while she chills out in Los Angeles?

When Jack pushed Flocke in the water, I wondered why he didn’t just shoot him, and then remembered that bullets seem to have no effect. Interesting that he does follow the law of physics that makes you fall in the water when somebody pushes you, but not the law of physics that makes you feel it when somebody shoots you. Oh wait, that’s the same law of physics. Like I said, interesting! I’m also really intrigued by the law of physics that lets you take a submarine down to some depth in about 30 seconds, but it will then take you 5 whole minutes to get back up to the surface. And the crazy law of Island Logic where Flocke can turn Sayid into a zombie after he’s been dead for two hours, but a friendly conversation with Desmond can turn him back.

Oh, and the crazy law of Island Logic where you can’t kill people with a bomb, but you can give them a bomb and set it to explode and then they can somehow use to kill themselves? How is it not the same as just killing them? And if that’s how it works, wouldn’t it be about a thousand times easier to, say, chase Jack off a cliff, wouldn’t it? Or to toss him down one of those wells — because if he just naturally starves to death, that’s not murder, in the same way that giving him an exploding bomb isn’t murder. These rules make no sense to me, and I’ve been able to make sense of time travel and quantum mechanics and multiverses on Lost — but for the “rules,” I’ve got nothing.

And way to kill Zombie Sayid, everyone. Lapidus, thanks for coming along for the ride, sorry it had to end this way. Oh, and P.S. Ji Yeon: sorry, you don’t have parents. They pulled a Titanic. Maybe you should have tried harder to be born a boy, since boys are important with major storyline that girls just “help” with.

Wow, do I sound bitter tonight? I’m really charged up from the talk I gave, but I’m also not appreciative of a show that makes no logical sense but also isn’t fun. If the story isn’t going to make sense, but I love the characters, we’re all good. But if the story doesn’t make sense and you’re killing Sayid (albeit with honor) and then making me watch Sun and Jin drown, and sucking all of the joy out of the room, you’ve lost me. At least they’re all still alive in the X timeline, and there seem to be some solid story reasons for their deaths.

Really interesting that Locke X hurt his father with a small plane and a pilot’s license — strongly reminiscent of what happened with Boone way, way back when. At this point, I no longer define the “brokenness” of Locke and his relationship with the Island in terms of the mistake he made when he essentially sacrificed Boone for his ‘mission,’ but this episode brought all that up again, and I think the writers do, in many ways, think of that as The Moment for Locke.

One last thing: Sayid told Jack that, basically, he was the one who was going to turn out to be the candidate (thus, the title of the episode). If Flocke is afraid because he “knows” that Jack is going to be the one that matters, #1 why doesn’t he just focus on Jack and leave everyone else alone? And #2, what’s the point of HAVING more than one candidate if you can tell which one is the most likely based on which one seems the most like a main character? And how does he know that they’re not all dead in that submarine? Would something have happened to him, something he could sense, if he’d succeeded in his mission?

Actually, this is the last thing: when you are killing people just to “shock” us, we can tell. Bye, Sayid, who is awesome! Bye, Sun, who hasn’t had a storyline in years! Bye, Jin, who is also awesome! Good job bringing diversity to the cast all those years, but now it’s time to make room for Jack’s rise to glory. Whatever.

One part of this article really made me think: I know we’ve complained that it is completely clear that some of the weird stuff that came up in the first season was clearly not meant to be resolved in the way it has been. But that’s a little unfair: we’re looking at a final endpoint, and expecting them to have had that specific endpoint in mind and have worked backwards. Damon points out that it’s a bit more important for them to have had some endpoint in mind for each specific mystery they brought in, not necessarily have interwoven all of them into the ‘final’ answer — and honestly, I think they succeeded in that. The article also acknowledges that time travel was used as a device to get at the themes of destiny vs. free will, and so I don’t know that we can expect that time travel to be “explained” as much as we can expect its impact to be large. Damon and Carlton also point out something interesting: you can always attack time travel or other science fiction aspects as a deus ex machina, but keep in mind that using physics means there are rules that they have to follow, or, thinking of it in a more helpful light, rules they can follow — scientific elements help keep the narrative on a track, even though it might seem like they allow the narrative to fly off in any direction.

I’m also reassured that they’re not going to try to come down on one side of the coin as far as the Big Philosophical Questions “Are we living with order or chaos?” and “Is there a God”? Instead, it sounds like what they’re doing is saying, “Those are age-old questions that any narrative is going to be struggling with, on some level; we’re bringing that into the context of ordinary people in extraordinary situations and tossing in the added complications of time travel, supernatural beings, multiverses, and other Big Questions that haven’t necessarily been asked in tandem with these particular Big Questions.” When you think about it that way, it’s extra cool that the Jack/Locke ‘man of science’/'man of faith’ issue has actually turned more into a Jack/Flocke ‘man who thinks we live in a world that carries meaning’/'man who think we live in a world of people who suck’ debate.

So: the Last Recruit? Jack decides to sit down with Flocke and get some ANSWERS. And finally someone, #1, encourages the asking of questions and, #2, has a conversation that involves the exchange of information. Then Jack and Claire get all family-shmoopy, and of course he doesn’t ask her any questions about the whole “once you talked to him you were WITH him” thing. Again, with our answers, we get more questions: the Smoke Monster, according to his conversation with Sawyer, can’t leave the Island by just flying over the ocean, so what was going on when Jack had visions of his father on the mainland? Was that Jacob? Was that still the Enemy, but just through a different mechanism?

I love how Ben X has a PhD in European History, and he doesn’t go, “JOHN Locke? No freaking way!” This show can be so ridonkulous. Along the same lines, Sawyer’s “Who the hell’s Anakin?” is a little ripe coming from a show that has dropped hundreds of Star Wars references, and plenty of them from Sawyer himself. I was also going to point out that Zoe’s pretty hardcore for just being a geophysicist, but then I thought about my PhD supervisor and she could definitely blow up an island or two if she wanted.

Kate X’s theory that Sawyer X didn’t arrest her at LAX (that is a LOT of X’s) because he didn’t want anyone to know he had been on a flight from Australia is an intriguing one. I had myself convinced he hadn’t actually killed anyone in this version of events — in particular because he was looking for Anthony Cooper once he arrived back in LA, so I’d assumed he’d avoided that misadventure. I’m also a bit in love with Jack’s idea that leaving the Island this time isn’t a good idea — first, because Flocke wants them to do it so badly, and second, because he doesn’t think this feeling of having something to accomplish on the Island is going to go away until that mission, whatever it is, is fulfilled. It makes a lot of sense, but it also gives us something to drive the action for the next four episodes: what is it that Jack has to do, and what happens after he does it? My mother noted that it’s hard for us to tell whether Jack or Sawyer was right in that argument, and I think the answer is that they were both right: Jack is the only one (with, of course, the exception of Locke) who felt that getting back to the Island was something he was ‘meant’ to do. Kate wanted to go because of Claire, Sun because of Jin, Sayid because of Ben. So I think it makes sense that Sawyer would be leading one group off the Island, and that would be the right thing to do, but that it would be the wrong thing for Jack to leave without having accomplished whatever it is he came for.

For a few sweet moments before that argument comes up, Jack and Sawyer are buddies! I love Leadership Sawyer. It’s also really interesting to me that Jack has been so beaten down by these experiences that he actually left Claire behind — any other time, he would have argued (and maybe he would have been right?). And the boat is back! The one named after Libby! You guys might not be aware of this, but the internet has been freaking out about the existence of that boat and whether the writers were going to forget about it and how sloppy that would be etc. etc. A lot of people were made really happy tonight. That includes me, but for different reasons: every episode of Lost should be made up of shots of hot dudes sitting on boats on a beautiful day. On that same note, this might sound a little bit nuts, but I’m beginning to suspect that there is real significance to it when people are wearing blue shirts. I’m also beginning to suspect that someone needs to make a video of Lost boat scenes with this playing in the background.

Why does Ilana X think that a SECRET SISTER is a GOOD SURPRISE for someone who is mourning his DEAD FATHER? And thinks he is showing up for a routine reading of a will? Sorry for overdoing the caps there. But, seriously? Worst lawyer ever, right? Also, when Jack and David first walked into the building, my initial thought was, “Why are they going to an adoption agency? Oh, man, David, you really shouldn’t have believed him when he promised you that you could never disappoint him.” I really loved the great attention to detail when David and Jack went to the hospital — they walked with exactly the same gait. It does seem a little weird that they are all totally lovey-dovey pretty much instantly, when two weeks ago David was terrified to tell Jack about the most basic facts of his life, but I get that there are some pretty serious time constraints to work with.

Sun X is alive! Best day ever! But you know things are going to get bad when Jin X says, “We’re all going to be okay.” Also, when regular Jin says, “We’ll never be apart again, I promise you” (which read as another Princess Bride reference to me, but I might be a little biased there). I think this means that they are totally screwed in the entire multiverse. By the way, were you all as concerned as we were that they were going to get fried by that sonic fence? We also noticed that Sun X recognized Locke X at the hospital; is she remembering him from the Island, or have they had some interaction in the X timeline other than on the plane?

Before we wrap up: here is the part where I rant about a couple of things. WHY do people keep INSISTING on using the word “raised” when referring to what Kate did for Aaron? Claire is nuts. You can very, very easily soften the blow just by saying “took care of.” You know how else you can soften the blow? “Your baby is with your mom, who isn’t in a coma anymore. Yay!” Don’t bait someone who is really struggling; it’s just cruel! And you’re not cruel to people who have guns, generally. And on that note: I understand that it’s pretty adorable that Kate wants so badly to reunite Claire and Aaron, and that it’s ultra adorable that Sun could magically speak English again when she saw Jin (even though, considering that they both speak Korean, it’s the exact opposite of necessary and sensical). But both of those scenes continue to place the importance of women on the Island in the exact 2 categories we’ve been dealing with for a few years now: motherhood, and being in love with dudes who get to have actual storylines where they get stuff done. They didn’t even let Sun go with Sawyer and they all know that she knows how to for-real sail, not just how to “Kate has apparently been on a boat but I don’t know when” sail.

Now for non-ranting mode: Lost is pretty cool these days. There’s never too much for me to write about, again because we’re getting a ton of answers and picking up speed rather than having strange clues thrown at us all the time. But every week now, I like the episode. There was a whole lot of switching-sides and double-agenting and running-into-people-in-the-X-timeline in this episode. Now, on-Island, we have everyone “together” in two groups, and the same is basically true in the X timeline — that hospital and that police station are pretty crowded places. I feel like things are in a pretty different situation now than they were an hour ago. Why didn’t Widmore want Jack? Does he not need him? Did he just want to get his hands on a majority of candidates? Why did they feel that they had succeeded when they had that particular ensemble on the beach? What is going on here? And what happens to Jack now? Why is he Flocke’s last recruit? Why doesn’t Flocke like to kill people himself? It seems silly for him to send Sayid off to do his dirty work when we know how many people have been killed by Smokey (by the way, I do not think Desmond is dead, and I think that’s because Hurley was right — you can bring people back from the dark side . . . like Anakin). Does this mean that he really can’t control what he does as Smokey? I know I’m supposed to help you guys with the answers, but right now, all I have is questions . . .

I think we’ve got a lot of momentum heading into the last four episodes. Each season, things pick up a lot just before the finale episodes, and then Lost basically turns into a movie, where everything happens in one continuous set of actions. I wonder whether that will happen both on Island and in the X timeline, since we seem to be all set up for that to happen; it might pick up there 2 weeks from now (oh, by the way: no Lost next week!) in which case we’d better be prepared for a bumpy ride. What to do next week? I suggest we spend some time outside or with loved ones. Just kidding, I’m totally going to work late!

• In case you haven’t noticed, the X timeline seems to be pulling absolutely everybody towards St. Sebastian’s, the hospital Jack works in.
• Also, apparently a hot theory, until last week’s episode, was that the X timeline was not actually an alternate timeline, but an epilogue to the series — stuff that actually comes later than the action thus far. Apparently this has fallen out of favor in the last 7 days, but I honestly have no idea how anyone could have thought this in the first place given, you know, all of the evidence? Overthinking It has a good list of some ways other people are approaching this season’s flash-sideways mechanism, and a pretty cool suggestion for a new way to think about it.
• Another thing that has been nagging me (which comes up in the Overthinking It post linked above): ever since the season premiere, there have been some arguments that the timeline had to diverge before the bomb went off, since otherwise everyone would be dead (like, for example, Eloise, who was on the Island in 1977). But that’s not necessarily true. People survive things they shouldn’t on this Island all the time — Desmond is a pretty perfect example of that. There are lots of ways to get out of the Jughead-death-scenario, including pointing out that Jack et al. weren’t killed but instead transported. But the simplest one is to keep in mind that the site of the Jughead explosion was special. Electromagnetic fields can (and do) act as “containers,” and we actually use this property for some well-known dangerous things like antimatter (that’s how you store antimatter since otherwise it would, you know, annihilate the atoms in any container), so the Jughead explosion could have easily changed the entire future of the Island in a way that wouldn’t be immediately lethal to living things on it. The alternate timeline may have more to do with the consequences of changes to the Island following Jughead’s destruction of these “electromagnetic pockets” we’re hearing about from Widmore than with the direct explosion itself.
• Sarah had a super clever idea in a comment on last week’s post, which I’ll quote here for those of you who missed it: “So you know how, in certain multiverse theories, you have the bulk, in which all universes “float,” and then you have the universes, which are “membranes,” and the only thing that can travel between membranes is gravity/gravitons? What if, in this multiverse, the Losties’ consciousnesses (okay, and maybe gravitons) are the only things that can leak between membranes?”
• I didn’t notice this at all, but Ack over at Ack Attack points out that the brooches Hawking is wearing are the same symbol that was branded into Juliet’s back. I don’t even know what to say — I’m stunned that this seems to be something we’re revisiting this season.
• My sense was that Eloise has some knowledge of what’s going on in the alternate reality, and that’s why she could give Desmond such specific instructions, but some are arguing that she knows this because it’s actually an artificially constructed reality (think the Matrix). I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I will point out that it’s somewhat in line with Widmore having paid a lot of money to have a fake Oceanic plane sunk in the ocean in the original storyline.
• Folks are also pointing out that, in this timeline, Eloise has a son who is a piano player, instead of a son who is dead, and that might be one reason that she wants things to continue as they have.
• Also, let’s say that Eloise has some sort of special gift that lets her figure this jazz out. Is this the kind of special gift that you get from shaking hands with Jacob? Or something entirely different? And what about Desmond?
• Another bit of evidence that it might not be love that connects the X Losties to their lives as the Regular Plain Old Losties, but rather anything profound: Claire remembering Aaron’s name a few weeks back when she was in the hospital fits with this rather well, especially now that we know she didn’t even know she was having a boy.
• In case all of this, and all of last week’s post, doesn’t add up to enough for you, you can also check out this awesome list of current theories, gathered from around the ‘net.
• And this thing that DarkUFO found, regarding the black/white scales painting found in Widmore X’s office.

I totally want to take a tour of the “Mr. Clucks Experimental Farm.” Doesn’t it sound like absolutely horrible things happen to the animals there? And yet Pierre Chang gives Hurley an awesome T-Rex trophy. I find it kind of ridiculous to believe that in a world where Hurley is a famous supermillionaire, women aren’t throwing themselves at him and then discovering that he’s actually really awesome. Not sure I’m a fan of the title being less about a contrast to everyone hating Hugo, and more a play on words: everybody loves Hugo, but nobody loves Hugo, in any multiverse, except Libby?

Michael! It’s too bad he went so terribly evil, because I really like Harold Perrineau and liked the direction that was going before Libby got shot in the gut. So the whispers are ghosts of people stuck on the Island? Um, what? The people who can’t move on because of what they did? How is this NOT purgatory? On the other hand, we’re not entirely sure we can trust Same Height Ghost Michael. After all, Hurley, Jack, and Sun are now headed in the direction of Flocke, who is trying to collect candidates like Jame Gumb collects skin suits, and I’m not sure about this but it seems to me that the whispers don’t accompany every apparition on the Island. Hearing whispers, or not, might be a clue to the origin of each individual Special Appearance by a Dead Person.

So should Hurley have brought a truckload of candidates to hang out with Flocke? Was that idea right? Was he manipulated by Flocke, who is trying to get all the candidates together? Was that really Michael? What is going onnnnnnnn? Speaking of people who just hang out with Flocke all day long, I love how Kate and Sawyer keep trying to demand answers of Flocke. Dudes, you have absolutely no power in this situation. If you’re so concerned, maybe you should run away.

Libby: “If I tell you, you’re gonna think I’m crazy.” Just like crazy Annie Dutton! But this was really interesting, since Libby only needed to see Hurley for everything to come back. I wonder whether the people who died in the regular timeline somehow have a better sense or ability to cross between the two timelines? That would explain why Minkowski seemed so over-the-top with Desmond. But that doesn’t work for Charlie or for Faraday . . .

However, I have to take exception, a little bit, to this implication of an epic, cross-multiverse love connection between Hurley and Libby. Is it just me, or were Hurley and Libby never this great big love affair? Didn’t they talk for a couple of episodes and plan a picnic? Aaron was Claire’s child, Sayid lived his life around Nadia in both timelines, Charlie died for Claire, and Desmond crossed time and space for his constant — are we really going to put Libby and Hurley in that category? I know that since then it has been built up into Hurley’s One Big Chance At Love, but I feel like in my memory, it was a bit more casual.

And then EXPLOSION! Awesome, awesome explosion. So I guess there goes the whole “Jacob training Ilana to protect the candidates” idea. I think it’s very interesting that Ben says that she died once the “Island” was done with her — after all that’s happened, I’ve gotten away from thinking of the Island itself and am in the mode of “Jacob and the Enemy” as the actors here. I found that phrasing significant. When Hurley blows up the Black Rock (good explosion, but definitely the second best tonight), he says that he did it to “protect” them, so I wonder whether we’re supposed to infer that a literal transfer has happened: Hurley is now responsible for what Ilana was responsible for, so she could die? And would that mean that Hurley, while important for caring for the candidates, is not the candidate?

Sarah and Betsey noticed Flocke’s long, drawn-out pause before describing the Island as “God-forsaken.”

Holy gaucamole, you guys: Jack trusts Hurley. And calls him Hugo! New Jack is quite charming! Party of Five level charming! Not Desmond level charming.

Hey: do you ever remember your flight number a week later? I mean, I never know my flight number while I’m actually boarding it. If my plane crashed and I was responsible for getting on a radio and saying, “We’re the survivors of United 1946!” I would be lucky if I could remember that it had been a four digit number. “We’re the survivors and I think we left from Philadelphia, I don’t know, maybe 3 hours ago?”

Desmond: “They blasted me with electromagnetism.” Flocke: “How can you be sure?” Here’s the easy answer: because there was a bright light and he was in the universe at the time, so electromagnetism it is. Betsey also pointed out that Desmond said, with confidence, “You’re John Locke” — was that to highlight that Desmond doesn’t actually know what’s going on, or to imply that he’s carrying around some extra information from his flashes?

I love that Richard asks Hurley to ask Jacob “what the Island is” and says that Jacob “told [him] what the Island is,” which is kind of interesting phrasing: there’s some way to describe the Island as a “what,” and it’s definitive and interesting enough that Richard uses it as a passcode.

Jack says that “ever since Juliet died” all he’s wanted to do is fix it. Um, Jack, ever since forever all you’ve wanted to do is fix it, whatever “it” was at any particular time.

I love that Desmond has a goal of getting all the Oceanic passengers to remember their other life, and in some cases, it’s so easy. Hurley and Libby take care of it themselves! And yet he has to hit Locke with a car — how does he know what to do, and how does he know it will work? I know that with only a few episodes left, Desmond is only going to be able to pull this on the main characters, but wouldn’t it be great to see him try to pull the whole, “This wasn’t the life you were meant to live” thing on someone who would have a rush of memories of dying in a plane crash? Oh, and it’s pretty neat that Desmond can see the apparitions that are appearing to Flocke.

This was kind of all over the place, but I think, at least a little bit, the episode was too. Lots of stuff coming together, but nothing mind-blowing to discuss in minute detail.

Fun quotes from a friend who has never watched Lost before this season: “I don’t LIKE Locke! Why do you like him?” and “I think Kate and Jack are in love.”

A bit of news: Lost is going to take a break on April 27th. According to people who pay close attention to the scheduling, this means there will be a new episode on May 18th just before the finale on the 23rd.

Also, today Carlton tweeted “Tonight a new chapter in the season commences,” so, you know, squee. And just to set this straight at the start of my discussion: awesome. Incredible. Maybe the second best ever, after the incomparable The Constant. And I love the direction this new chapter is headed in.

So, shall we? What do you all think?

Hey Desmond, I think you might have the world’s worst in-laws! I mean, it’s possible that Penny X’s mom is a totally lovely person, but I think it’s more probable that she’s a totally dead person. At least we got confirmation that she’s Daniel’s half sister (“but I WHOLE love her!”).

Widmore tells Desmond, when explaining why he should probably be willing to make some wack sacrifice in Dharmaville, “My son died here for the sake of this island.” That’s not exactly how I remember things going down with Faraday — you? And what sacrifice do you think it is Desmond is going to have to make? Do you think he’s going to have to commit to being stuck in a timeline where he is not with Penny to avoid everybody dying and/or the Man in Black getting off the Island?

I like how they just showed us the answer to time travel, and it’s basically 1.21 gigawatts. And, apparently, a bunny — the bunny seems to be very important. Smooth move, Lost. The bunny, by the way, was named Angstrom, so I think it’s fair to say that we’ve balanced out all of the philosophy-ish names with science-y names, and that the tension between science and faith is back in full force.

And George Minkowski X picks Desmond X up at the airport! Fisher Stevens (X) is so hilarious. When he asked Des X if he was looking for any “company,” I was halfway hoping he’d take him up on the offer just so we could see who it would be. I’m not sure about the significance of this, but did it seem to all of you that Minkowski was really pushing the “Whatever you want” and “I’ll take care of you no matter what” a bit hard?

I thought it was a little weird how they played the VIOLINS OF DOOM when Desmond X walked into Widmore X’s office — I mean, don’t we sort of have every reason to believe that that’s totally fine in the alternate timeline? And then he suggests that Desmond X have some super fun times hanging out with Charlie X, and offers him a glass of the MacCutcheon that he was so nasty about back in the day! The “nothing’s too good for you” was a LITTLE over the top, though. WE GET IT, IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD, A DAZZLING PLACE I NEVER KNEW.

Oh, I get it! “No matter what you do, you’re NOT gonna die, Charlie.” Fun times! That’s a neat device, and it confuses the issue once again on this question of destiny vs. free will.

Interesting: when Charlie was blacking out during the whole choking death thing, he was having a vision of his other life, with Claire. Which is interesting, but at some point we have to start asking why, for the last 5 years, nobody was saying things like, “I had a dream that I was a funny cop!” or “I had the strangest feeling that I recognized Rose.” And we have to start suspecting that the answer is, “Because this is a device that we did not have in mind 5 years ago.” But perhaps the answer is, “Because that storyline was the way things were meant to be, and this timeline is terribly, awfully, fundamentally wrong.”

Desmond’s always been special, though, so I am totally willing to buy this when it comes to him and the “not Penny’s boat” moment — if I’m going to be okay with anybody getting to blur the lines between the two timelines, it’ll be him. I’m also really interested in this new idea of the old timeline being the more authentic timeline (or more important, better, whatever you think it might be), which is what I think is happening here with both Charlie and Desmond and, eventually, Daniel. At every stage before this, the two timelines were different, divergent, and from our point of view obviously one was super dramatic and had gone on for 5 years while the other was brand new, but there was no reason to believe they were anything other than two neutral options. Charlie and Desmond, though, are having flashes of the other alternative being highly preferable.

And THAT is fantastically interesting because Damon and Carlton have been running all around saying that we shouldn’t think of the flash-sideways as an “alternate timeline,” presumably because they are two equal/neutral options and that was what I was prepared to deal with this season. In this episode, though, that’s entirely turned on its head. Perhaps what they meant was that these aren’t truly two different timelines at all? And now I want the X’s to get back to the right timeline, just as badly as I wanted the Losties to get back to the Island.

By the way, just like in every other flash sideways episode, the mirror stuff happened: Des saw himself reflected in a door, and Daniel was reflected in Desmond’s limo window (Charlie too, I’m sure, though I didn’t catch it).

When everyone was freaking out about “having to tell Mrs. Widmore” that the concert wasn’t going to happen, I knew instantly that it would be Eloise (I had an advantage, though: I saw Fionnula Flanagan in the credits). My thought was that the problem wasn’t going to be her being an awful lady who would flip out over a change of plans, but that she had been particularly insistent about this because she was desperately trying to arrange this concert in order to bring key players together. And then when Eloise (X? I’m not so sure) told Desmond X not to worry about it, I was quite certain that it was because she, in this timeline like in the other, was working with some foreknowledge of what exactly would and should happen. Same thing when she freaked out about Des trying to look at the guest list, and in particular when she used the phrase “violation.” Causality violation! You guys: I. Love. Eloise. Hawking. Go back and listen to that whole conversation again — it’s priceless. “It’s about time,” “one expects certain unpredictability” — it gets pretty ridiculous. Then think about this: Eloise X should still have a copy of Original Daniel’s notebook, since she got her hands on it in 1977 before the Incident. Is your mind blown?

When Desmond catches Penny’s name, her last name is Milton. That’s in line with the theme of philosophical names (and a reference to Paradise Lost makes a lot of sense in the Lost context), but I’m interested in who it comes from.

We found it pretty interesting that Eloise described the thing Desmond wanted more than anything else as Mr. Widmore’s approval rather than, as we would have expected, Penny. Betsey wondered whether the alternative timeline shows people getting, in one way or another, whether they would have chosen for it to play out that way or not, what they always wanted — in the other timeline. Charlie wanted not to die, and tonight he couldn’t; Daniel wanted to play piano, and now he does; Hurley wanted to be lucky, and he is. But like so many stories where you get a wish granted to you, it doesn’t necessarily work out how you’d want; Des really wanted to be with Penny, and Widmore’s approval was just a sidetrack. It gets sticky when trying to apply it to some characters — what’s going on with Jack? Is that all about him fixing the father-son problems? What about Kate? Sun and Jin? — but Eloise was rather clear and obvious about it in at least the case of Desmond.

Best part of this episode: “He said it was physics. Something that only someone who had spent their entire life studying physics could come up with.” Man, apparently I am SUPER advanced! So are Betsey and Sarah, so woo ladies! I love how he “took the equations to a friend at Caltech.” I have two of those!

HOW MANY PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY WANT TO RUN UP AND DOWN IN THIS FREAKING STADIUM? And yet none of them said “lift it up.” Are they going to make me wait forever for this? And Overthinking It asks a pretty reasonable question: if Desmond showed up in a dark, empty place and then passed out in front of you, would you go out on a date with him when he woke up? At a coffee shop that I am sure Juliet X and Sawyer X are going to be hanging out in?

A thought: this episode is really taking us back to the Constant, the idea that a person, a strong emotion, is what keeps you anchored in time. And that’s a pretty woo idea in and of itself. It’s not as annoying as “Good and Evil live ON THE ISLAND YOU GUYS,” but it’s also not a scientific explanation. In fact, it might even be the something in between. Bear with me for a second: it’s the science that makes it possible for a person’s constant to “collapse their wavefunction,” but it’s the more spiritual side of things, the tension between your destiny and free will, that determines your constant and, perhaps, that makes the constant significant. This line of thinking could bridge the gap between what’s going on with Jacob/the Man in Black and what’s going on with the crazy electromagnetism and time travel components of the Island. This isn’t a world of science or a world of faith, to bring us back to the first season, but rather a world where both coexist — and why wouldn’t they?

During the episode, Katie floated the idea that there might be only one Desmond, one consciousness, which would explain why he can always bridge the gap between different times. But these things are happening to other people, too — Daniel and Charlie, at the very least, because of their whole shmoop love thing (notice that seeing Kate apparently doesn’t cause Sawyer to have crazy alternate timeline flashsidewayses, but seeing Sawyer does do that for dying-in-a-hole-Juliet). In some ways, then, it might be possible for everyone to “access” the original timeline while living in the X timeline, but Desmond still seems to have the special power of shifting his consciousness back and forth between them, going in and out of those two consciousnesses. What if there’s something a little more complicated than only 1 Desmond going on here? What if there are, say, 1.5 Desmonds? Something like almost two whole consciousnesses that share some critical components — like mentally conjoined twins? And I think there’s a corollary to that question: does Eloise fall into the same category?

Someone on TWOP floated what I think is a pretty interesting theory. I wouldn’t be too thrilled if it turned out all of this came down to “love is the most important thing in the universe,” even though that seems to be what’s going on for Charlie and Daniel. But what if, instead, it’s more like any kind of memory can bleed through, but only insanely profound feelings make you believe it, make you realize that there is something significant in your memory that you can’t quite remember? Then Charlie might, for instance, think that the important thing there is Claire, but what’s really important is the entire Island experience and the other life he doesn’t remember living; the strength of that feeling is just what woke him up to it.

One thing that really wound me up: Desmond’s “Yeah, of course, lead the way” to Badass Sayid (who, by the way, sounded more like himself this week than he has in quite a while, and also uncharacteristically let Zoe survive) was quite perplexing. Possibly he’s just fully on board with any plan that involves getting away from Widmore’s people. But I think he woke up knowing something that we don’t know, something that leads him off with Zoe and smack into a Sayid he is not surprised to find in that precise location asking him to take off, and now we have to wait at least a week to find out what it is.

Oh, and also: DESMOND (X) NEEDS TO SHOW EVERYONE ON OCEANIC 815 HOW THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO CRASH ON AN ISLAND (and, potentially, fall in love?). Cannot wait! How will he show them? Charlie seemed to think the trick was near-death experiences, but I suspect that mostly worked for him because his storyline on the Island was, when you think about it, primarily about escaping death (until he didn’t). I don’t think Desmond flashed to the other timeline because his life was flashing before his eyes, but because something familiar from the other timeline was. This is consistent with what happened with Daniel too, so possibly this issue is already settled. But Desmond got even more flashes when he was in the MRI machine, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence; the fact that Widmore is trying to use electromagnetic fields (to see whether Desmond can survive them and, then, I suspect, to use them to send Desmond off on some kind of mission) and that Desmond’s consciousness was “awakened” by nuclear magnetic resonance must be related. Desmond’s crazy time jumps are inextricably linked with electromagnetism, which we all know by now is inextricably linked to the Island’s special characteristics.

One last thing to leave you with: Widmore X and Eloise X were probably both on the Island in this timeline (that’s consistent with everything we know, and with Ben and his father having been on the Island, which is consistent with The Incident being the timeline break-off point). Do they therefore know something extra?

Here’s where I’m coming from: over the last few weeks, we’ve begun to realize that these special gifts that show up on Craphole Island are specifically granted by Jacob. It seems that Sawyer can see apparitions who appear to others, Hurley can talk to the dead (in fact, I noticed that he told Sayid’s dead body that he’d be around if he ever needed to talk), that Miles can access the last moments of a dead body, Richard can live forever, and Jack has an endless supply of Jears, all because of some kind of gift from Jacob (on that same topic, won’t it be exciting to find out what some of the other gifts are? Can Desmond jump through time because he was Touched by a Jacob?). Maybe you have an idea, but the gift that Locke had, specifically, is still mysterious to me — but we’ve seen him talk to Taller Ghost Walt, for example. And since the episode The Substitute, where Flocke saw a little kid that looked like Jacob in the forest, I’ve been trying to connect that vision with Taller Ghost Walt and Locke’s gift. By the way, I realized on my second viewing that the kid says, pretty clearly, “You know the rules. You can’t kill him.” Not you couldn’t kill him, or shouldn’t have killed him, or anything that puts “kill” in the past tense so that we know the Man in Black succeeded. Interesting . . .

We’ve also all noticed that Flocke acts a LOT like Locke, so much that we were fooled for a good chunk of last season, and this season he has adopted some of Locke’s most well-known traits (even going so far as to say “Don’t tell me what I can’t do”). We also know that the Man in Black has told folks, like Richard, that he used to be a normal man, with a mother and a life, who experienced joy and pain, until he was stuck on the Island, which made me wonder whether that body used to belong to a normal dude, in the same way that Locke’s did, and that this isn’t the original form of the nemesis.

What all this comes down to is that I’m starting to suspect that the reason Flocke seems a lot like Locke is because Smokey is, in some sense, Locke, now that he takes his form. I think he saw that little boy (who looked like a young Jacob) in the jungle because he’s in a body that has that capability, as gifted from Jacob, and I think he acts like Locke for similar reasons. Remember when he told Ben the last thought in Locke’s head, before Ben killed him? He said that Locke’s final thought was, “I don’t understand.” How would he know? And even as he laughed at how pathetic that was, he was that same pathetic man, and I think all of these add up to there being some more complex relationship between the Man in Black and the bodies he inhabits. Ilana has said to Ben that Flocke can’t change his form anymore, and is stuck this way. At the time, we wondered whether that had to do with Jacob being dead, but I’m wondering whether it’s more complex than that — the last time that we know the Nemesis was in human form was about 150 years ago, and it’s possible that he has been left only in the form of Smokey for the last little while and can only take — and leave — a body under certain circumstances.

So: Have we recovered from last week? No? I still don’t know what to think. I had really been hoping that we were going to learn about Richard’s life on the Island, since the “mystery” that was revealed last week wasn’t so much a mystery — we knew he came on the Black Rock, encountered Smokey while he was chained up, and that he ended up working for Jacob. I wanted to see what the next 150 years were like!

• Apparently, Jacob doesn’t touch Ilana, and is even wearing gloves, possibly to prevent doing so accidentally.
• Posters on TWOP are making a big fuss about our knowledge that Richard eventually participates in the “Dharma Purge” where Ben gases everybody. #1, how do things get to that point? #2, why would someone who was completely wracked with guilt over an accidental death, so much so that he dedicated an eternal life to serving someone else, participate in that? And #3, how are we ever supposed to believe that Jacob could possibly be good after that?
• Also, what happened in that exchange between Richard and Jacob that makes Richard think he can die if someone else kills him?
• My personal feeling is that Jacob and Whoever are not God and the Devil, but rather “gods,” with the lower case g (J came up with this theory independently of me about 20 minutes into the season, so that kind of deflated my excitement). And that can mean a bunch of different things to different people, but I suspect that we’re never going to get a specific answer. They are not THE higher powers in the Universe, and Carlton and Damon aren’t saying “Our characters are literally the God and the Devil you’ll think of when you hear those terms,” but they do have some of the powers of gods, in the Zeus sense.
• There was one thing I really did love: when Jacob trotted out his silly, “I bring people to the Island where they suffer immensely and are murdered and terrorized by the Man in Black, and I don’t get why they don’t spontaneously turn into super good people” argument and Richard pointed out that, while Jacob might not want to intervene, the Enemy had no such problem and that was probably related to why people kept disappointing Jacob.
• On the other hand, I don’t think we see a lot of evidence that Richard did a substantially better job of explaining things to people so that they could make “good” choices. As in, we see a lot of evidence of the opposite of that. But it’s the thought that counts?
• I’m also rather enamored of this new idea that when Smokey “judges” people, he’s not trying to figure out whether they’re good or bad or redeemable or any of the things we thought before, but is instead trying to gauge whether they could be useful to him.
• Why do you think it is that Jacob can’t bring Isabella back, but he apparently can keep people from dying in the first place (like Dogen’s son, and perhaps Juliet’s sister although we have no idea whether that was real or not)?

So that’s 1200 words and we’re not even on this week’s episode yet. One last thing before we get there: I’m going to predict right now that “the package” is what’s in the locked room on Widmore’s sub, and that it’s Desmond. And: BAM!

Wow Jin X, way to be a total jerk to the poor hotel desk clerk without even telling him your name. Give the kid a chance! I stop being mad at him when I find out he and Sun X are totally in LOOOOOOVE. It’s so much better when people are happy in the X timeline. Hey, do you guys think Jin would come stand in my bathroom shirtless so that I could swing the door open and show him to my friends?

Flocke keeps insisting that he doesn’t want to hurt people, or that people should really be angry at the Smoke instead of him (even though he’ll also admit to being Smokey). I wonder whether there is something in the “rules” that forces the Man in Black to take certain actions in certain circumstances, and that he’s compelled to follow them even though he’d prefer another approach. Of course, there’s always the possibility that he’s lying, but basically admitting to having killed people and then trying to pretend that you didn’t want to isn’t exactly the cleverest plan — so I’m leaning toward there being a grain of truth there.

I love Flocke’s “Whatever happens, happens.” So clever! Great news that Claire is going to have a chance to murder Kate later on down the road — should be fascinating. Also interesting to know that Flocke considers Kate not to be on the list of candidates anymore, and I wonder whether he’s right about that (because she wasn’t in the cave) or wrong (because her name was still in the Lighthouse). If he’s right, and Kate’s only purpose for him is to bait Jack and Sawyer into leaving the Island, I’m going to be pretty mad, especially if the Kwon candidate does turn out to be Jin instead of Sun. I also thought it was pretty interesting that Flocke said to Claire, “Oh, but I do need you” and didn’t elaborate, and 2 seconds later implied that he might need her for something stupid and degrading like Kate and she didn’t get it. Is Claire just there to keep Jack and Kate in line? Or something more?

Flocke is trying to get all of the candidates together, because it’s the only way he can leave the Island (fascinating that they needed to be together to get back to the Island as well . . . ). Portions of the internet are freaking out that he’s rounding up the candidates so that he can kill them. What if it’s the opposite, though? What if he really does need to round them up so he can leave, but once they’re together they have the power to kill him?

Also: does it seem really strange and coincidental to you guys that out of hundreds of years on the Island (or at least 150), it is at this moment in time that there are only 6 candidates left and that the question of Jacob’s replacement is finally ready to be answered? It seems to me that there’s a connection: Smokey’s ability to kill Jacob through some loophole came about at the precise time when there was a distinct possibility of Jacob finally being replaced.

I’m really interested in why Widmore’s people grabbed Jin and dragged him off to Room 23, but left all of the other candidates behind. I understand that he wanted some of Jin’s Dharma expertise, but this, to me, implies that Widmore doesn’t have a sense of who the candidates are, because he would have been interested, I think, in getting a hold of them if he could.

Mikhail! And he loses his eye! Destiny, you guys. DESTINY. Clearly, not a good guy in the X timeline either. Although, I guess in the regular timeline he was technically doing what Jacob wanted, via Ben? Or not because maybe Ben was making all that stuff up?

This isn’t really important, but I think the guy who plays Widmore has had a little Botox, because he looks younger now than he did a couple of years ago and that’s not quite how it works. And how can he be a bad guy when he shows Jin pictures of his little girrrrrrl? Along the same lines, Jack has REALLY chilled out. The scene where Sun is screaming at Richard and Jack just shrugs? You guys, he shrugged. I don’t think Old Jack would understand what people meant when they shrugged. And as Sarah pointed out, the old Aladdin “Do you trust me?” thing is pretty adorable. If he keeps this up, my plans to end the series with a Jears pinata could be ruined!

Apparently, Widmore is on Team Jacob aka Team Don’t Let The Man In Black Off The Island, but we know full well he’s not on Team Ben, and who knows what that means?

What do you guys think it means that Sun can’t speak English currently? Is it just an obstacle to make things slightly more complicated? Or is it supposed to have some deep meaning — which must be the answer, right? P.S. Stop wasting paper, you don’t have an unlimited supply, when are you people going to understand that you’re stuck on an island? Some folks have suggested that Sun, on-Island, stopped being able to speak English after Sun X looked in the mirror. The mirror motif has been pushed pretty seriously throughout the flash-sideways-es, so this might be a hint at a connection between the two worlds. Fingers crossed that the mirror thing somehow means it’s Sun who’s the candidate.

I don’t even mind Sayid as a brainless, soulless, swimming, killing machine. He’s pretty much 100% excellent at it. Are we supposed to mind? Although I’m a bit concerned for Sayid X: my whole “don’t take someone out to where there are no witnesses so you can kill them, just in case they kill you” idea is probably going to fall apart once Sun X is taken to an emergency room with a GSW.

Next week: Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. Translation: they are going to try to make us cry. By killing Desmond.

p.s. Hey Mom, I bet you were totally jazzed to see Sheila Kelley again tonight! It helps if you think of her character as Liz Lemon.

The post is going to be a little lighter this week; I’m about to start a few nights running the telescope, so I’m going to post this before going to bed late tonight and then sleep right through the time when I normally do the bulk of my research. I’ll fill you in on any news at the start of next week’s post!

At the start, it sounded like we were going to learn a lot about Ilana tonight too, but it eventually transitioned to being a Richard-only episode. And we start getting answers from the very beginning: Ilana was tasked, by Jacob, with protecting the six “main candidates.” I love how Jack is now totally willing to listen to other people’s stories.

I loved Richard’s whole, “You’re dead! You’re all dead! You’re not on an Island, you’re in hell” deal. Nawww, man, I’m pretty sure it’s purgatory (noob joke). Don’t believe Richard: that was super super super obvious, so even if you think they’d totally screw us over, they’d do it with a little panache. By the end of the episode, I’m fairly convinced that the Island may very well be hell — but not in the sense that if you’re bad and you die, you go there, so everyone on the Island is a bad, dead person. Rather, I think it’s in the sense that it’s where evil hangs out. Or, perhaps, it’s a handy shorthand for Jacob and the Enemy to use to try to explain a more complex situation to the mere humans (or maybe I should just say to the mere men, because the only woman we’ve seen on the inside of the Jacob-Richard-ManinBlack-Ben-etc. club is Claire and she was getting smacked at the time).

Actually, when you think about the Island as hell, that whole “you can only come and go on a boat” thing starts to have some mythological overtones. A poster on TWOP also points out that being told the Island is hell and is keeping the devil contained is kind of like finding out that you need to press a button every 108 minutes to save the world: it might sound ridiculous, and it might be ridiculous, but if you choose not to believe it and you turn out to be wrong, you’ve put yourself in a situation you can’t fix.

Babs tells us that Hurley said, when he was first talking to Isabella on the beach, “I don’t know where to find him.” Jack coming up to him was pretty cool, since it was the first time we’ve “seen” Hurley talking to someone from the perspective of another character who couldn’t see the apparition.

In 1867, Richard lives on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands (woo astronomy) and Babs calls it: that’s why Hurley was speaking in Spanish to whoever was on the beach with him. Hey, just in case you guys didn’t know, medical care in the 1860s kind of sucked, and so did being poor, so let’s spend at least 10 minutes learning that lesson.

In the scene with Richard and the priest, I was getting this strong vibe that Richard is going to turn to Jacob as an alternative to God, rather than as a god, which is an interesting spin on the question of “who is good/who is evil.”

Along those same lines, I’m wondering whether Lost is going to suddenly take these parallels to God and the Devil and turn them on their heads. Bear with me: the evil thing about Satan isn’t that he promises you what you want most (Nadia, Isabella, Aaron, escape from the Island) and that those promises manipulate you; the entire problem is that those promises are false, or that the ultimate deal you’ll get is, well, worse than what you’re bargaining for. But what if the promises that the Man in Black makes turn out to be the real deal?

And then, at 9:20, just when I’m starting to get bored: MAGNUS HANSO. Woo! Remember the Hanso Foundation from way back in the day? They financed the Dharma Initiative, and Alvar Hanso is a descendant of Magnus. That doesn’t end up going anywhere, but it’s one of the few things I have to hold on to, so I’m going to.

Why can’t they get a slightly better budget for CGI? Seriously, you’re going to sell a zillion copies of the season 6 DVDs. Let them create a realistic ocean for 15 seconds!

So, Smokey gets a look at Richard and decides not to kill him (but maybe does figure out that Isabella is the way to get to him). And we’ve thought that we’ve seen that before, like when Smokey didn’t kill Locke, or when he did kill Ecko but not before showing him some scenes from his past life. Then we spend several minutes watching Richard slowly die, so that’s super fun, and then he starts looking like Jesus, and then Isabella shows up, the spitting image of Jennifer Beals, and tells him that they’re dead and in hell, and then Smokey eats her, but I’m choosing to believe that she was nothing more than a “test” — to see whether he would let her risk her life to save his — or a temptation to manipulate him.

Either way, Richard is having a tough time, and then Titus Welliver The Enemy shows up! And maybe actually he is the good guy and it’s Jacob who keeps eating people, or maybe the Man in Black doesn’t want to eat people but still has to, and maybe Jacob is the devil, and maybe The Enemy is manipulating Richard, and maybe they both manipulate everyone, but they’re totally not going to tell us that tonight. If anything, they’re just going to help us figure out some of the pieces to the puzzle, not the final picture.

So what is the deal with not being able to kill The Enemy or Jacob if they speak to you first? Is that ringing any mythological bells for anyone else? Because it isn’t for me. Here’s what the Man in Black says: that Richard can’t let Jacob speak first because he can be “very persuasive.” Maybe it really is that simple: there’s no actual rule that you have to kill them before they speak; rather, they each know that the other can just as easily claim new recruits, and know that if they want people to do their bidding, it has to happen quickly. And that really is an indication of what’s going on here: there’s no fundamental, clear reason that people should be siding with Jacob instead of with the Man in Black, and neither of them is standing back and letting people do what they want (no matter what Jacob says to the contrary). The Enemy also shares that he is the Smoke, and that he is sorry but when Isabella was running away — from Jacob, he claims — it was already too late. He goes on to claim that Jacob is the devil, and that the devil stole his body and his life, and that Jacob has Isabella and Richard has to kill him. Confused? Me too. Then Jacob baptises Richard, get it? See what they did there?

It’s cool that a wooden boat smashed up a giant stone statue.By “cool” I mean “ridiculous.” I don’t think the writers realize that when we want answers, we want complex answers to complex questions, not something like “Q: Where did the rest of the statue go? A: Oh it was just an accident, a ship bumped it.” It’s also cool that, apparently until the end of this season, we get to watch Jacob and the Man in Black just screw and toy with people and confuse us about who’s good and bad and then we find out that they both are! This probably IS purgatory, guys. It’s also cool that we finally get a special Richard episode and he spends the whole time looking un-adorable.

We find out that Jacob brings people to the Island purposely to prove that people are, deep down, truly good and not all sinners. A lot of pain could have been prevented if he had brought Anne Frank to the Island. We also find out that Jacob can’t absolve Richard, or perhaps anyone, of his sins, but he can make him live forever so that he’ll never go to hell. Anyway, Richard’s going to hang out on the Island and be Jesus now: an intermediary between Jacob, who does not want to interfere with people, and the people, who keep getting tempted by the Man in Black, who lacks those scruples. What, exactly, that mission involved and why, exactly, Richard believed in it so thoroughly for 150 years or so, we don’t know.

If Hurley was talking to Isabella, does that mean she was actually (physically, I mean) there on the Island at some point? How? What is going on here? How do we know whether we ever heard from the ‘real’ Isabella, or whether we saw one version that the Enemy created and another that Jacob created? Are horrible, horrible things just going to keep happening to these people in the name of some stupid game and then we find out whether or not the people running the game are evil? I’m very glad that my finale plans involve making (and then destroying) a Jack pinata because that might be the only thing I have to look forward to.

Oh, and this whole “being an immortal who had an awesome wife who died a very, very long time ago and whom you miss all the time” thing is completely the plot of Highlander. Just like everything else in this episode, it’s recycled: we already know that Jacob is trying to keep the Man in Black from getting off the Island; we already know that dead people sometimes show up but that we don’t know the ‘rules’; we already know that Jacob and the Man in Black manipulate people and that we don’t know why; we know that there is this issue of destiny vs. free will, and that Jacob brings people to the Island just to TOY with them; and we already know that Flocke is the Man in Black so there’s no reason to cut to him and then play the CREEPY MUSIC OF EVIL.

Here’s my issue with this episode: it feels, to me, like all of the suspense is gone. For me, once you invoke (and then reinforce for good measure) “Jacob and the Man in Black are characters with God-like powers and one of them is maybe the devil,” I’m not too concerned about the details of which is good and which is evil or whether it’s more complicated than that, or with the details of how that situation might play out, because the cat is already out of the bag as far as the higher power question goes, and we might as well just read this and get on with our lives. The question, itself, is answered at that point. In Back to the Future, we don’t care about the details of how a flux capacitor works; in Star Wars, we’re not sitting on the edge of our seats trying to figure out the details of the Force and whether it makes lightsabers work; there isn’t an extra half hour at the end of Citizen Kane where we learn the exact motivations of the sled and the details of its construction. It’s the general framework that matters. Essentially, is this a story about time travel, or is this a story about gods? There are no original questions here — do we have free will? Are we controlled by destiny? Those aren’t questions that Lost can put to rest, so they also can’t be the entire foundation of the last 5 years. There’s a chance that this episode was meant to be our answers about Jacob and the Man in Black, and that we can now veer back to time travel and Desmond and submarines and Widmore, but somehow I doubt it.

By contrast, I also don’t think it would be fair of Lost to now completely backpedal and totally toss out these concepts of binary morality, of heaven and hell, of Jacob vs. the Man in Black, having just given us an hour that completely reinforces the impressions we’ve had so far. In other words, you can’t pretend to reveal to us the foundation of your mythology, and then tell us that it was a fakeout, and call that amazing storytelling. I’m not going to say that there’s no potential here or that things can’t change, because obviously I think that would be a bit of a stretch. The arrival of Widmore, for example, certainly hints at a complication about to be thrown into the scheme. But I do think we are, to some extent, committed to some of these elements, and four years after being promised that the Island is definitely not purgatory I’m not thrilled with what I’m seeing.

There is one thing that I truly want to know: what is the loophole that let Ben kill Jacob? Why did Jacob not even try to fight Ben, when we watched him kick the daylights out of Richard? And another thing: at this point, they are bending over backwards to avoid saying the Man in Black’s name. When we eventually find out, it had better be good. I’m thinking along the lines of “Zeus” or “Voldemort” or “Rosebud.”

Hey you guys? What if Lost totally sucks now? If this parade of bitterness is getting you down, Ack has a much sunnier viewpoint and raises some excellent questions that I didn’t have the energy to ask.