I Am DB

DEJA VU
We wake up with Jack in the jungle, in a shot that recreates the very first scene of Lost ever, right down to the music. But we quickly see that this time is different. Jack’s hair is longer. There is no Vincent the dog watching him. And he looks just the slightest bit excited and hopeful. Unlike the last time, when he ran out of the jungle, this time he runs further in (and I wondered if there was any significance to him dropping the torn note from his hand).

He finds Hurley and Kate in a lagoon, and Kate is surprisingly unharmed – not even bruised – despite laying across a few big rocks in the water. How did she manage to land there without getting hurt? When Jack wakes her up, he says they’re back on the island.

MS. HAWKING’S A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME
46 hours earlier, Jack, Sun, Ben and Desmond are meeting Eloise Hawking. She leads them into the basement of the church, where we saw her emerge a few episodes ago from a hatch-like room. Turns out it looks like a hatch because it basically is a hatch, complete with Dharma insignia on the door. The station, as she explains a moment later, is called The Lamp Post.

As they all observe the room with its huge map of the earth on the floor and a massive pendulum swinging over it, she tells them that this is how they – the Dharma Initiative – found the island. Ben claims he didn’t know about this place, but Ms. Hawking casually tells Jack that Ben’s probably lying. Jack notices a picture of the island taped to a chalkboard. Printed at the bottom is “9/23/54 – U.S. Army – Op 264 – Top Secret.” Ms. Hawking begins to explain, and as it’s a lot to take in – and pretty important stuff – I’m including it all:

“The room we’re standing in was constructed years ago over a unique pocket of electromagnetic energy. That energy connects to similar pockets all over the world. The people who built this room, however, were only interested in one.”

“The island,” says Sun.

“Yes,” Eloise continues, “the island. They’d gathered proof that it existed; they knew it was out there somewhere but they just couldn’t find it. Then a very clever fellow built this pendulum, on the theoretical notion that they should stop looking for where the island was supposed to be and start looking for where it was going to be.”

“What do you mean ‘where it was going to be?’” Jack asks.

“Well this fellow presumed, and correctly as it turned out, that the island was always moving. Why do you think you were never rescued? Now, while the movements of the island seem random, this man and his team created a series of equations which tell us, with a high degree of probability, where it is going to be at a certain point in time. Windows, as it were, that while open, provide a route back. Unfortunately these windows don’t stay open for very long. Yours closes in 36 hours.”

This is a long bit of exposition, but in the hands of the great Fionnula Flanagan, every word drips with intrigue. So my questions, which I’m sure will be answered somewhere down the line:

-She said the Dharma Initiative had gathered proof that the island existed. Why were they looking for it in the first place? How did they know to look for it? And how long ago was this?

-Who was this clever fellow that built the pendulum, and who was his team that helped him develop the equations? Why do I suspect – though I have no idea yet how it would make sense – that Daniel might be the clever fellow? It’s gotta be someone we already know; why else keep the name so deliberately secret?

-What is the connection between this church and the Dharma Initiative? Why is The Lamp Post there?

On a side note, I was especially jazzed by the notion of these “windows,” having just completed reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in which parallel universes exist and can be accessed through small windows that can only be seen under unique circumstances. Those windows are in space, not time…but still. Cool stuff.

Back to the scene at hand. Desmond looks amusingly skeptical during Ms. Hawking’s speech, and he can’t believe they all want to go back to the island. For his part, he tells Ms. Hawking that he’s there to deliver a message from Faraday, her son. (Why don’t Jack or Sun react at all to learning that this woman is Faraday’s mother? She doesn’t even react much to Desmond’s news. She almost looks as though she expects this and has to put up with hearing it.) He’s about to leave, but she says the island is not done with him yet…which is too much for him.

“This woman cost me four years of my life,” he explodes, “four years that I’ll never get back, because you told me that I was supposed to go the island. That it was my bloody purpose.” He approaches Jack and says, “You listen to me brother and you listen carefully. These people, they’re just using us. They’re playing some kind of game and we are just the pieces. Whatever she tells you to do, ignore it.”

It does often seem like they are all pawns in a game…but who are the ultimate players?

“You say the island’s not done with me?” Desmond says to Ms. Hawking. “Well I’m done with the island.” And out he goes. Again, there’s little reaction from anyone to what he had to say…like the fact that he went to the island because of Ms. Hawking. That’s one thing I’ll say has bugged me about this show over the years – characters often fail to react appropriately to the revelations and circumstances they witness. Who would stand there in that room and listen to Desmond’s rant and not say, “Wait a second...what happened?” In a way, this is the same thing as my big beef with last season – the complete lack of mourning Claire did for Charlie, aside from the moment she first learned he was dead. It’s just bad writing…and all the more noticeable when everything else is written so well.

Ms. Hawking hands Jack a binder with pages of flight information, presumably related to all of these pockets of energy around the globe. She says their window will be open in a little over a day. In order to catch it, they must be on Ajira Airways, flight 316, bound for Guam. All of them.

Ajira Airways. Well, now we know how that water bottle got to the island. This is probably nothing, but I was struck by the fact that only half of the flight number is composed of one of Hurley’s numbers. Their original flight, 815, used two of the numbers, and almost every time a number is used on the show, it combines others from the infamous 4 8 15 16 23 42 sequence. Yet this one is 316. I couldn’t help wondering if this suggests a shift in the fate of the 815 survivors, as if their history is about to be altered in a significant way. It’s probably nothing, but this is how Lost has conditioned my brain to work.

Some of the particulars of Ms. Hawking’s language are important to note. “If you have any hope of the island bringing you back, then it must be that flight.” This suggests again that the island itself holds the power. And the words “it must be that flight” hearken directly back to Season One’s episode Raised By Another, in which a psychic tells Claire that she has to go to Los Angeles to give her baby up for adoption, and that she has to be on Flight 815. His words were nearly identical: “It has to be this flight.” Kinda makes me wonder if the psychic, Richard Malkin, is part of this society of people who know about the windows and the pockets of energy and the island. Maybe he’s too marginal a character for that…but the coincidence is striking. And Malkin did show up in another flashback later on – when Mr. Eko was a priest sent to investigate the miracle of a girl who survived drowning. The girl was Malkin’s daughter, and he confessed to Mr. Eko that he was a fraud who bilked people out of their money. But later developments in that episode suggest that he might have some real ability after all. Anyway…another random Lost connection? Or something more?

On another note related to Ms. Hawking’s revelations, remember the Season Two episode S.O.S., a flashback for Rose and Bernard? When he learns she has cancer, he takes her to Australia to see a healer named Issac of Uluru, who says to her, “There are certain places with great energy. Spots on the earth. Like the one we’re above now. Perhaps this energy is geological; magnetic. Or perhaps it’s something else. And when possible, I harness this energy and give it to others.” After a brief psychic examination, he says he can’t help her. “It’s not that you can’t be healed. Like I said, there’s different energies. This isn’t the right place for you.”

Lots of digressions, I know – but I love the way the show is drawing on its history as it enters these final seasons.

Another thing Ms. Hawking tells them is that they need to recreate the circumstances of the original flight as best they can, meaning (among other things) as many of same people have to be on it as it is possible for them to arrange. Which begs the obvious question: where is Walt in all of this? Why isn’t his presence required…at least on the flight, if not on the island? I was convinced all during the episode that he was going to show up. I was waiting for it in the airport, I was waiting for it on the plane…waiting…waiting…I just can’t believe that his still-mostly-unexplored-“specialness” is not going to come back into play. Maybe, like Claire, his full-time return is being saved for Season Six.

Jack asks what will happen if they can’t get anyone else onto the plane. Ms. Hawking says, “All I can tell you is the result would be…unpredictable.” I hope the show will explore at some point the significance of them all needing to return together, and not just leave it hanging. I also was left wondering why this window was their only opportunity to return. Given the many flights listed in the binder, surely it would be possible to reach the island again sooner than later. How much time passes between the openings of a given location’s windows?

PRIVATE SESSION
Ms. Hawking leads Jack into her office. (When she opens the door and turns on the light, we briefly glimpse the back of a Virgin Mary statue on her desk – just like the heroin-filled ones from the island.)

She hands Jack an envelope with his name on it: John Locke’s suicide note. Jack didn’t realize Locke had taken his own life. Ms. Hawking said that obituaries don’t usually mention it when people hang themselves. There’s a minor inconsistency here. Last season, when Sayid busted Hurley out of mental hospital and informed him of Bentham’s death, he said, “They said it was suicide.”  Who said it was suicide? How did Sayid learn of the death? Not by reading the obituary apparently, because Ms. Hawking says it wasn’t mentioned. And Jack would have known if it was mentioned, considering what effect the obituary had on him when he first read it.

Ms. Hawking tells Jack that as part of the need to recreate the circumstances of the flight, Locke must serve as a proxy for Jack’s father. Jack must take something that belonged to his father and give it to Locke…an idea Jack dismisses as ridiculous. “Oh stop thinking how ridiculous it is,” she chides him, “and start asking yourself whether or not you believe it’s going to work. That’s why it’s called a leap of faith, Jack.” (Nearly the exact words Locke said to him in Season Two when he first asked Jack to push the button in the hatch.)

THE APOSTLE
When Jack emerges from his meeting with Ms. Hawking, Sun is gone. Ben is in the sanctuary, and asks Jack what Ms. Hawking said to him. Jack says it doesn’t matter and asks in return, “Who is she? Why is she helping us, how does she know all this?” Uhh…those are all great questions, Jack. Why didn’t you ask her, when you were just in there??? Idiot.

Ben, of course, ignores his question and launches instead into a story about a painting on the wall. “Thomas the Apostle,” he says. “When Jesus wanted to return to Judea, knowing that he would probably be murdered there, Thomas said to the others, ‘Let us also go that we might die with him.’ But Thomas was not remembered for this bravery. His claim to fame came later when he refused to acknowledge the resurrection. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around it. The story goes, he needed to touch Jesus’ wounds to be convinced.”

“Was he?” Jack asks.

“Of course he was. We’re all convinced sooner or later, Jack.”

I sense more foreshadowing at play here; foreshadowing that positions Jack as Thomas and either his father or Locke -or both – as the resurrected. Jack looks one more time at the painting of Thomas touching Jesus’ wound.

Tonight’s episode deals with what happens to Locke when he leaves the island (and it promises to feature some major revelations). What I wonder – and I don’t know that we’ll get the answer tonight – is will this episode be the last we see of Locke alive, other than perhaps flashbacks? Or will he come back to some semblance of life upon returning to the island? He seems crucial to the island’s future (and it’s hard to imagine the show without him), so I have to think that he’s not done yet. But maybe this act of sacrifice – the specifics of which we’re about to learn – is his final duty to the island. Perhaps like Moses, who led the Jews to the Promised Land but was forbidden by God from entering himself, Locke’s final purpose is to lead his one-time comrades back, without the hope of being able to stay. It would be a truly bold, intriguing stroke to remove him (largely, at least) from the story at this point—not unlike what J.K. Rowling did in the sixth Harry Potter book to a certain character who I won’t mention (but c’mon, anyone who doesn’t already know who I’m talking about doesn’t deserve to be shielded from the spoiler in the first place. Seriously, the book is like four years old).

Anyway… seeing Locke to his end-point halfway through this season and then moving the show forward in the wake of his sacrifice would be quite a development. But I don’t think we’re done with him yet…

The final – and crucial – note of the church sequence is Ben leaving, and saying to Jack, “I made a promise to an old friend of mine. Just a loose end that needs tying up.”

Oh shit…he’s going after Penny.

UNEXPECTED VISITS
There’s an odd, mid-episode interlude with Jack’s grandfather, and I didn’t know what to make of it. If the only purpose of the scene was so Jack could get his father’s shoes, why bother? It seems like a waste of time. Jack must have something of his father’s already that he could have used. Why this diversion? Was it planting the seed for something yet to come? In an episode that seems to make heavy use of foreshadowing, perhaps this was another sign? The fact that Ray Shephard is trying to escape, has a packed bag, an interest in magic…I dunno. The whole thing was weird.

So was the next visit, but for entirely different reasons. This time, Jack is the visitee, not the visitor. When he arrives home at night, he discovers Kate curled up, dressed, on his bed. She looks a mess – tired, out of it. A day must have passed since she took Aaron and left Jack and the rest at the pier. She asks if he’s still going back to the island, and when he says yes, she says she’s going with him.

Jack: Kate, what happened? Where’s Aaron?
Kate: Don’t ask questions. If you want me to go with you, you’ll never ask me that question again. You will never ask me about Aaron, do you understand Jack?

He easily, quickly says yes; she says thank you; she kisses him…and I’m thinking, what?!? A little boy, your nephew, just dropped out of the picture, and you’re going to roll over and not ask any questions? What do you think, she left him with his grandma? You don’t wanna know where he is? You don’t care what happened to this three-year-old child?!? Dude…I don’t care how much you love Kate and want her to come with you. Unless you lied to her face and are planning to ask her where he is the moment the plane is in the air, then that is seven shades of fucked up.

YEAH, CAN I GET A 1/2 POUND OF SMOKED HAM, A 1/4 POUND OF MUENSTER AND THE DEAD GUY IN THE BACK?
The next morning, just after Kate leaves, Jack takes a phone call from Ben. He’s on a pay phone at a pier; his face is badly bruised and streaked with blood; his hair is wet and matted, and he’s soaked all over. He says he’s been sidetracked and asks Jack to pick up Locke’s body. Seems obvious Ben went after Penny. My hope is that when he got there and prepared to go in for the kill, he saw little Charlie, which caught him off guard long enough for Desmond to arrive, kick the shit out of him, throw him overboard and sail away at Ludicrous Speed.  That’s what I hope. Ms. Hawking said the island isn’t done with Desmond. I sure hope the Irishman doesn’t return to the island to avenge Penny. I’m still not over Claire and Charlie being ripped apart. I can’t handle the demise of Penny and Desmond’s relationship.

Jack goes to the butcher shop, where we see Ben’s friend Jill again. Her appearance is brief, so it looks like we’re going to be left for a while with the question of who she is, who her associates are (Ben had asked her about people named Jeffrey and Gabriel), and what the deal is with this network of off-island helpers who seem very much in the know. Alone with the coffin, Jack opens it up and replaces Locke’s own shoes with his father’s. “Wherever you are John, you must be laughin’ your ass off that I’m actually doing this. Because this, this is even crazier than you were.” So apparently Jack is now back to thinking that Locke is crazy. ‘Cause we know from a past conversation with Kate that after Locke got off the island and came to see Jack, he believed what Locke told him. But that was in his boozing, pill-popping phase.

Jack puts Locke’s suicide note back in coffin. “I’ve already heard everything you had to say John. You wanted me to go back, I’m going’ back.” He closes the coffin and adds, “Rest in peace.”

I suspect there will be no peace just yet.

FLIGHTPLAN
At the Ajira Airways ticket counter, Jack arranges to have Locke’s body transported to Guam for burial. As he walks away, the man in line behind him says, “My condolences. I’m sorry you lost your friend.”

This is Caesar.

Jack sees Kate arrive, but she doesn’t stop for him. Sun arrives and greets him, much to his pleasure. “If there’s even a chance that Jin is alive, I have to be on that plane,” she says. Which is great, Sun…but what’d you tell your mother, who is home in Korea with your daughter? Do you have any concerns about how you’re going to get off the island this time? Do you expect to be able to return? Cause Ben told Jack to pack a bag with anything he wanted in this life; he’d never be coming back. Was that just because of what Jack must do to fulfill his own destiny? Or is this a one-way ticket for all involved? Why didn’t anyone ask Ms. Hawking about that?

And speaking of Ji Yeon, this would be a good time to bring up a fine point from reader Kathy W., who was irked that Sun’s daughter wasn’t required to return to the island too. After all, Sun was pregnant with her when she left. Shouldn’t the kid be right in the thick of the mystery? A fair point…

Jack and Sun are stunned to see Sayid across the terminal, being led by a woman to a security checkpoint. She flashes a badge and they go through.

This is Ilana.

Although I didn’t know how Sayid came to be there, my initial reaction to this appearance was that he was trying to recreate the day of Flight 815, when he was detained by airport security because Shannon, at her bitchy best, reported than some Arab guy had asked her to watch his bag while he went to the gift shop.

We next see Hurley, obviously out of jail and sitting in the terminal, reading a comic book. He was reading a comic on Flight 815 too. This time, he carries a guitar case. Is that supposed to represent the guitar case Charlie was traveling with?

Jack approaches Hurley, clearly happy to see him, but surprised. He asks how Hurley knew to be here. “All that matters is that I’m here, right?” answers Hurley, who seems uncomfortable to see Jack.

As Jack boards the plane, Sayid sees him and leans forward, looking as if he wants to say something. But then he glances at Ilana seated next to him and thinks better of it. She notices his movements, notices Jack, but then faces front.

Jack is happy to see everybody, but Kate, Sayid and Hurley all seem on edge. Something is going unsaid. None of them seem to acknowledge that they know each other. Caesar is there, seated across from Hurley. And just as the doors are about to close, Ben arrives. Sayid sees him, and this time his face registers…what is that look? Relief? Surprise? Whatever it is, he seems unable to do anything in his present situation. Is he handcuffed? I can’t tell, but if so, that would be another recreation of Flight 815, when Kate was handcuffed by the federal marshal.

Unlike Sayid, Hurley’s reaction to Ben’s arrival is vocal.

Hurley: Wait! What’s he doing here? No no, he can’t come!

Jack: If you wanna get back, this is how it’s gonna have to be.

Hurley: No one told me he was gonna be here!

Ben: Who told you to be here, Hugo?

Jack tells the concerned flight attendant that everything is fine, looking to Hurley. “Right?” Like an irritated teenager telling his parents what they want to hear, Hurley says, “Yes, Jack, I’ll be fine.”

The flight attendant hands Jack an envelope, telling him it was discovered when customs checked his cargo. It’s Locke’s note, and as she hands it to him, Caesar is framed directly in the background, watching. Coincidence? Not a chance.

Ben takes his seat across from Jack, and when Jack asks what’s going to happen to everyone else on the plane, Ben responds – in that way only Ben can – “Who cares?”

After they reach cruising altitude, Jack sits down next to Kate and marvels at the coincidence that Sayid and Hurley are there, and that they are all back together. Does he really think they just happened to be on this flight? Does it not occur to him that they were somehow notified, which might then lead him to wonder how they were convinced to come? Kate’s buzzkill response is, “We’re on the same plane, Jack. It doesn’t make us together.” Just then, the captain introduces himself over the intercom…and the hits just keep on coming: it’s grizzly chopper pilot extraordinaire, Frank Lapidus.

Jack asks the flight attendant if he can speak to the captain, and moments later he is greeting a clean-shaven Frank, who says he picked up the Ajira gig eight months earlier and has flown this route many times. He asks why Jack is going to Guam, but then looks into the cabin and sees Sayid. And Kate. And Sun. And Hurley. “Wait a second…we’re not going to Guam are we?”

Some time later, Jack is back in his seat, and Ben is reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Jack asks Ben how he can read. “My mother taught me,” he answers drolly. Of course, seeing as his mother died in childbirth, I don’t think she taught him much of anything. Even in his sarcasm he can’t be honest! (But now that I think about, as a boy on the island, Ben met his dead mother in the jungle once. Maybe they got together occasionally after that for poltergeisty home schooling.)

Jack asks if Ben knew Locke killed himself. Ben says no, but doesn’t seem to react with surprise or emotion at all, making me think he did know. Jack wonders if he (himself, not Ben) is to blame for Locke’s suicide, and Ben assures him that he’s not – for what that’s worth coming from Ben. Ben moves to another row further up to give Jack privacy while opening the letter. The note is brief. It reads, “Dear Jack, I wish you had believed me.” It is signed “JL.” Then the plane starts to shake. It grows worse, and soon we hear the same noise that accompanies the flashes on the island. We see the white light….

DEJA VU REDUX
…and we’re back where the episode started…which was already back where the whole series started. Jack in the jungle, getting up, dropping a torn piece of Locke’s note from his hand as he runs toward Hurley’s cries for help. In the lagoon, Jack wakes up Kate, and together with Hurley, they wonder why none of them remember crashing. There is no sign of Sun, Sayid, or Ben (or Locke). As they prepare to split up and look for the others, they hear a noise. A Dharma van drives up on the ridge overhead. The driver emerges, rifle pointed down at the new arrivals. It’s Jin. In a Dharma uniform.

Whoa.

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
-Now that our friends are back on the island, how long before we learn more about Eloise Hawking? And speaking of which, remember when Desmond was living in a monastery making wine with the monks? The head monk had a photograph on his desk, and in that photograph was himself…and Ms. Hawking. Does that monk, and his church, have a connection to the Dharma Initiative, like Eloise and her church? And just what is her connection to the Dharma Initiative? If she is indeed one and the same as Ellie from the Jughead episode, how did she go from being an Other with Richard to a Dharma dame? And as for Desmond, was his fate already in motion even then? Remember, as he was preparing to leave the monastery and resume his normal life, he helped a visitor load several boxes of the monastery’s wine into her car. That visitor was Penny, who told the monk that her father had sent a check for the wine in advance. The monk said to thank her father for his generous donation.

So to sum up: Ellie was an Other with Charles Widmore; Ellie might be Ms. Eloise Hawking; Ms. Hawking operates out of a church; Ms. Hawking is pictured in a photograph with a monk in England; Charles Widmore supports this monk’s monastery. Are we seeing the pieces of a network reveal themselves?

-You may be wondering why I brought up Caesar and Ilana before we even know them by name. In my first message of the season, I mentioned that we’d be meeting two new people who are said to factor into the overall arc of the show in a big way. Well, we just met them. According to Damon and Carlton, they will be recurring characters this season with the likelihood of becoming regulars next year. So I highlight them now because we haven’t only seen their faces for the first time; I believe we’ve seen their influence as well. Sayid is obviously in some form of Ilana’s custody, and I have little doubt that she and Caesar are somehow responsible for Kate and Hurley being there as well…which means they are responsible for Aaron’s current whereabouts. Are they also responsible for Lapidus flying this particular plane? We saw in the preview for tonight’s episode that Ilana talks to Locke at some point after his return. And Caesar definitely knows something about Locke’s suicide note. Who are these two, and who are they working for?

-It appears that the plane did not crash, but rather that it got caught up in one of the flashes. Did the plane continue toward Guam, with only those who are supposed to be on the island staying behind? We’ve gotta figure that Caesar and Ilana will be on the island. What about Lapidus? I hope so. That guy rules.

Entertainment Weekly’s Doc Jensen suggested another possibility regarding the fate of Flight 316, which I liked…though I’m not sure I believe it: “Remember back in Season 3, when the Others made Kate and Sawyer do hard labor on Hydra Station Island? According to Lost lore, the thing that they were helping to build…was an airplane runway. So…what if instead of getting magically downloaded out of the sky by The Island like Jack, Kate and Hurley, Ben’s Ajira contingent merely landed safely on that runway? What if the very reason that Ben wanted to build that runway was because somehow (Jacob? Time loop? Precognitive powers?), he knew that one day he would need it?!”

-I’m less curious about why Jin is in a Dharma uniform – I can pretty much make an educated guess about that one – as I am about how he happened to be on that ridge at that moment, almost as if he expected somebody to be in the lagoon below. What was he doing there?

-Did it bother anyone else that no Ajira flight crew asked Hurley to stow that huge guitar case? He just had it sitting in the seat next to him!  That’s so not regulation…

Also from the EW.com files, Doc Jensen was answering reader mail, and addressed a question about Locke continually getting wounded in the leg after the island restored his ability to walk again. Here is his answer:

“It’s interesting to note that Locke loses his legs whenever he gets put on a new path — and, perhaps, sometimes as a karmic scolding for deviating from the path he’s supposed to be on. Locke succumbed to the temptation of chasing after his cruel, criminal father — and he got tossed out a window. Locke got caught up in the Hatch’s weird drama — and he got his legs crushed under the Blast Door. What happened right before Alpert gave him his mission to bring the Oceanic 6 back to the Island? That’s right: shot in the leg by Ethan. Every time Locke’s hero’s journey gets rebooted, he’s delivered back to a square one: Busted legs. But then he takes the leap of faith, and he’s healed anew.”

I would add to that list Locke’s legs failing him when he and Boone discovered the cargo plane in the tree canopy…but I can’t remember the specifics of that event, so I’m not sure if it fits Doc Jensen’s theory. Anyway, kinda neat.

LINE OF THE NIGHT
“You tell me, Jack, you’re the one that got to stay after school with Ms. Hawking.” – Ben

Tonight’s Episode: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

There’s a LOT to say about this episode, so hold your calls, cancel your dinner plans and let your kid walk home from soccer practice; it’s only five miles. We’re gonna be here a while.

SMOKEHOUSE
On the island, Jin is trying to wrap his head around his introduction to a young, pregnant Rousseau, who tells him that her ship sailed in November 1988. Jin wants to look for his camp, but agrees to help lead the French crew to the island’s radio tower, since he doesn’t know where his camp is from their current location. (Though I’m not sure how he knows where the radio tower is, from there or anywhere. The only time we’ve seen the radio tower was when Jack led the bulk of the crash survivors there to call the freighter for help. But Jin wasn’t with them. He stayed on the beach with Sayid and Bernard to spring a trap on the Others. Captain Continuity, at your service…)

Early in their journey through the jungle, shit starts to go down. One of the French crew, Nadine, disappears. As they look for her, we hear the ominous chirping/flapping sounds that precede the classic appearances of an old, familiar friend. You know him, you love him…give it up ladies and gentlemen for the Smoke Monster!! [Insert sound of applauding crowd.]

Yes, Smokey starts doing his uprooting-trees-from-the-ground act, and drops a dead Nadine down from above. He/she/it circles around and grabs Montand, dragging him through the jungle while the others give chase. They arrive at an old building, with a large opening in the ground where two corners meet. The smoke starts to pull him down, so they all jump and grab his arm, forming a chain to try and pull him back. The tug-of-war results in his arm being torn off as he is yanked below.

Ehh, good riddance. That guy was a prick from the get-go. But moments later, they hear him calling from the depths, crying out that he’s hurt, that the smoke is gone and that he needs help. Despite Jin’s objections, the others start to go in. Rousseau tries to follow, but Jin stops her, indicating her baby. As they wait, another flash occurs. Jin buckles, holding his hands to his ears. But Rousseau just looks at him, already freaked out, and asks what’s wrong. It seems as if she doesn’t see the flash and is not affected by it.

I had questioned this in an earlier episode; I haven’t been able to tell if only those moving through time can see the effects of the flash or if others can see it too. When Daniel approached Desmond at the hatch, Desmond seemed to take note, but maybe that’s just because of Desmond’s own time-tripping experiences. Richard didn’t seem to notice it when he was mending Locke’s gunshot wound, though he was expecting it. 1950’s Richard didn’t seem to notice it either when Locke came to the Others’ camp to ask him about getting off the island.

That’s just one of the questions this scene leaves. How about the fact that way back in the Season One finale, the smoke grabbed hold of Locke and tried to drag him into a hole in the ground (though not the same hole). In that instance, Jack grabbed Locke’s arms and was able to hang on long enough for Kate to retrieve a stick of dynamite and drop it down the hole.  Yet now, in less time than Jack was able to hold onto Locke alone, four people fail to overcome the smoke’s strength, which is so intense that the dude’s arm rips off. So why did Locke fare better? Was Smokey not trying as hard? Maybe as some kind of extension of the island’s consciousness, it knew that Locke was too important to harm? Maybe it was just luck, and Locke was only seconds away from losing his arm too. Or perhaps Smokey’s heart just wasn’t in it that day, lucky Locke.

Another important question, which reader David E. raised, was what would have happened if Jin wasn’t there? There was a time when Rousseau and her people arrived on the island and didn’t meet Jin. That Rousseau would be the same one we eventually came to meet after the plane crash. Did that Rousseau follow her companions into the hole? If so, does whatever happened to her down there partly account for her fragile mental state sixteen years later? Or is the behavior we’ve always observed purely the result of being isolated in the jungle for sixteen years, watching her crew go crazy, killing them and having her daughter stolen? Seems like that would be enough to do it. So did she follow them down the first time? If she did, then Jin has altered the future by stopping her. What will be the consequences of that?

AND THEN THERE WAS ONE
Jin is alone now, and we get a better look at the building above Smokey’s nest. It looks like stone, and has carvings all over it – which resemble the same hieroglyphic-like marks we saw in Ben’s secret room last season. Remember? He disappeared behind a similarly marked door and came back having apparently summoned Herr Smokey. The markings also look like the ones that started flashing when the 108 minute countdown in the hatch expired and the alarm went off.

I wondered if this structure where Jin is now standing might be The Temple, where Ben directed Alex, Rousseau and Karl before Keamy invaded. If it was, Rousseau showed no sign of recognizing it on the map as the place where she had once been. (And speaking of which, I sure hope Ben’s sooty chamber wasn’t a secret passage directly to The Temple, because if it was, why didn’t he just send Alex, Karl and Rousseau that way?)

Jin notices Le Prick’s severed arm still on the ground – rotting, but not yet fully decomposed. There’s still flesh on the hand, so it must be relatively soon after the arm was torn. Making his way to the beach, he finds two of the Frenchmen shot dead, and then he sees Rousseau, still pregnant, pointing a rifle at her lover Robert. He pleads with her to lower the gun and stop what she’s doing, but she yells, “You’re not Robert. You’re someone else. That thing changed you. You’re not Robert. You’re sick. That monster made you sick.”

“It’s not a monster,” he tells her. “It’s a security system guarding that temple.” He convinces her that he doesn’t want anything to happen to her or their baby, but when she lowers her weapon, he raises his and fires. Unfortunately for him, the gun either jams or is empty. Either way, she shoots him dead. Jin runs over, but she turns the gun on him, shouting that he disappeared and that he’s sick too. She starts shooting, so he runs into jungle, where the next flash occurs and reunites him almost immediately with Sawyer and Co.

Before we get to that, what are we to make of the comment about the security system? We’ve heard Smokey described that way before – by Rousseau, in fact, back in the Season One finale when she was leading Jack, Kate, Locke, Hurley and Dr. Arzt to the Black Rock for explosives. When Jack asked her what the system was protecting, she simply answered, “The island.”  So that’s as much as we know about the smoke; what does Robert know about it? What did happen down beneath The Temple? What led Robert to pull his gun on Rousseau? (I thought my suspicion from a few scenes earlier was confirmed by Robert’s line about the temple. But then I wasn’t sure, as I feel like older Rousseau, who knows the island so well, would have registered this when journeying there with Alex and Karl. So I don’t know if the place is The Temple or a just a temple.)

By the way, here’s another interesting reference, which I stumbled across on Lostpedia: on that Season One journey to the Black Rock, when Rousseau and company enter the Dark Territory, she tells them, “This is where it all began; where my team got infected; where Montand lost his arm.”

I had forgotten about that. Did I mention that I love this show?

ORCHID BOUND
Though Jin’s English skills are coming along mystically well, he still can’t quite grasp everything Sawyer is explaining about the time warps. He asks Charlotte to translate…which makes her a bit uncomfortable, as if she was deliberately concealing her ability to speak Korean. They do all seem surprised when she translates. Jin wants to know how Locke is sure that Sun is off the island. When she explains to Jin that Locke is attempting to leave so that he can bring Sun and the rest back, Jin can’t figure out why he’d do that. “Because,” Locke says, “she never should have left.”

As they continue their trek to the Orchid, Charlotte asks Daniel if Locke’s plan will work. “It does make empirical sense that if this started at the Orchid then that’s where it’s gonna stop,” he tells her. “But as far as bringing back the people who left in order to stop these temporal shifts, that’s where we leave science behind.”

Two more flashes occur, one right after the other, and everyone is feeling the effects – only Daniel and Locke have yet to suffer nosebleeds, and Charlotte collapses after the second flash. When she comes to and sees Jin standing over her, she speaks to him urgently in Korean, then switches to English to implore, “Don’t let them bring her back! No matter what! Don’t let them bring her back! This place is death!”

As Charlotte seems to trip in an out of the present, talking like a little girl one moment and addressing the group the next, Locke knows they have to get to The Orchid as soon as possible and that Charlotte will slow them down. Daniel refuses to leave her, and finally – after yet another flash – agrees to stay with her while the others go. I wonder if his decision to stay with her is somewhat prompted by guilt over abandoning his perhaps-one-time-girlfriend Teresa, given both women’s common symptoms. Is he looking to Charlotte to provide him with redemption?

As the others prepare to move on, Sawyer asks Locke what happens if the Orchid is not there yet/anymore when they arrive? Casually, Charlotte answers “Look for the well. You’ll find it at the well.” The well, eh? This seems reasonable, considering the shape of the hole Ben descended into from The Orchid to turn the wheel. That space seemed well-like. Hmm…

Something else I want to mention. Did you notice that in this episode, the flashes looked significantly different? They were much more violent and jagged then in previous episodes – less sci-fi, more horror. Was this just a different director introducing his own style (the director of the episode hasn’t directed any others yet this season)? Or was it a deliberate attempt to make the flashes seem more dangerous and aggressive?

REDHEAD REVISITED
Locke, Sawyer, Juliet, Miles and Jin arrive at the Orchid…only to have it disappear in another flash almost instantly. But just through the leaves, Locke discovers Charlotte’s well. It’s surrounded by three or four stone pillars, giving the whole site a sort of ancient look. I wonder if these stone columns and the well might have been built by the same people who created Smokey’s temple…and perhaps a certain four-toed statue that we haven’t seen in a while. Don’t they all look like they could be the work of the same group?

Miles asks the question on all their minds: “How the hell did Charlotte know this was here?” (An interesting question coming from Miles, who told Charlotte last season while Daniel was ferrying people to the freighter that he was surprised she would want to leave the island after trying for so long to get back there. Charlotte played dumb, but Miles clearly knew that Charlotte had a history with this place.)

Regardless, the question is valid, and we get a hint of the answer when we return to her and Daniel and she reveals that she grew up on the island but left with her mother when she was young, only to spend the rest of her life searching for a way back. Her confession takes a turn for the creepy when she says, “When I was little, living here, there was this man…this crazy man, he really scared me. And he told me that I had to leave the island and never ever come back. He told me that if I came back I would die. Daniel…I think that man was you.”

There really is nothing like having the woman you love tell you that when you traveled back in time, you met her as a little girl and scared the Christ out of her. But Charlotte’s story makes sense; we’ve already seen Daniel appear in the good old Dharma days, when The Orchid was under construction. If Charlotte was on the island as a girl, with the Dharma Initiative, it stands to reason that she could have crossed paths with Daniel. But there’s that whole circular thing of time travel that plays taunting games with my mind. I’m attempting to recall my Doc Brown lessons from Back to the Future Part II, but Lost‘s time travel rules may be different. Charlotte telling Daniel that this incident in her childhood happened seems to ensure that it will happen, because Daniel hasn’t actually made that trip back in time yet. Now when he does, he’ll most likely find the younger her and warn her not to come back. But that act will create a new timeline that runs parallel to the one we’re witnessing; an alternate reality (a concept which the show’s producers have already dismissed, but stay with me anyway!). For the Charlotte existing at this moment, that encounter with Daniel shouldn’t have happened at all, because it would take her telling him about it to make it happen. Damnit, I can’t explain myself without a chalkboard!!! Trust me, I know what I’m trying to say even if I can’t really say it without illustrations. It’s the same thing I was saying earlier about Jin and Rousseau (again, credit to reader David E.): in the timeline of older, now-deceased Rousseau, Jin was not there to stop her from going into the hole. So when he stopped her, an alternate timeline was created. Right?  Am I crazy?!?

Don’t answer that. Let’s just move on. You wouldn’t want my brain to explode before I finish this write-up, would you?

Would you?

Daniel tells Charlotte that he spoke to Desmond about tracking down his mother, who can help. But he doesn’t get to explain any more. Charlotte briefly goes back to a little girl voice…and then dies.

Now I don’t think there’s any doubt we’ll see Charlotte again. The question is, will we only see her in a younger form, or will we see her as played by Rebecca Mader again? Is that really it for Charlotte as we’ve known her? If so, it seems like she never quite got to fulfill her character’s potential. What purpose did she really serve? And why (I know, I know…I ask this every week) was she chosen by Matthew Abbadon to go to the island? I guess we’ll have to see what the show has in store for her. The story she told Daniel about her childhood didn’t mention what happened to her father, or her two younger sisters. (We know about them from early last season, when Ben rhymed off a list of facts about Charlotte to prove he had information about the people on the freighter – information that included her getting her Ph.D at Oxford. Might she have crossed paths with Daniel pre-island?) And why do I think that Charlotte might have some connection to Annie, Ben’s childhood gal pal from the Dharma Initiative?

JOHN LOCKE’S FANTASTIC ISLAND
Anyone remember the Looney Tunes compilation flick Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island, in which Daffy and Speedy Gonzales shipwreck on a remote island and discover a magical wishing well? I’m not saying that the movie holds the key to Lost‘s mysteries. I’m just saying…I love me some Looney Tunes.  Anyway, where were we?

Oh right, back to the well, thanks to Charlotte’s tipoff. And by the way, even if she spent time on the island, how would she know about the well and where it led?

A rope descends into blackness, and Locke is about to climb down. He tells them he’ll be back as soon as he can, but Jin stops him and says not to bring Sun back. He grabs Locke’s machete and threatens to cut the rope, insisting that the island is bad and Locke is not to bring Sun back. After Locke finally promises, he says, “I won’t go to Sun, Jin, but she might find me. If she does, what do I tell her?” Jin answers, “Tell her I’m dead. You say I wash up. You buried me.” He gives Locke his wedding ring for proof.

John says his farewells and climbs down the rope. But just after he disappears into darkness, the next flash comes, and the now-familiar blinding white light seems to emanate from deep within the well itself. He falls and crashes onto rocky, uneven ground. Far above, Sawyer is left holding a rope that leads into the dirt. There’s no well, no Orchid. For all Sawyer knows, he has just lost yet another companion.

Underground, Locke is in excruciating pain – a sharp rock or some such object has violently pierced his leg. And then a figure approaches from around the corner. Enter Christian Shephard. “I’m here to help you the rest of the way,” he says. Christian explains to Locke,  “When you came to see me in the cabin, you asked me how to save the island and I told you you had to move it. I said that you had to move it, John.”

Locke: Ben said he knew how to do it. He told me that I had to stay here and lead his people.
Christian: And since when did listening to him get you anywhere worth a damn?

Explaining what Locke must do, Christian goes on, “There’s a woman living in Los Angeles. Once you get all your friends together – and it must be all of them; everyone who left – once you’ve persuaded them to join you, this woman will tell you exactly how to come back. Her name is Eloise Hawking.” When Locke says that Richard told him he would die, Christian says, “I suppose that’s why they call it a sacrifice.” Locke takes this in, and then says he’s ready.

I gotta say: anyone who says Lost has become mired in sci-fi wackiness at the expense of it’s tradition for rich character explorations can put this whole sequence in their pipe and smoke it. Here is a true character moment 4.5 seasons in the making – John Locke accepting his fate, doing something monumentally important even knowing that it will result in his death (a noble sacrifice that follows in Charlie’s footsteps). The Man of Faith is on the cusp of taking the ultimate leap and fulfilling his destiny, and the show has been preparing us for that since the fourth episode of Season One, when we saw his first flashback. Terry O’Quinn is terrific in these scenes, conveying the full weight of what Locke is taking on and showing us his fear mingled with his excitement. When he is about to climb down the rope, Sawyer asks if he wants them to lower him down. “Where’s the fun in that?” he says, nervous but smiling warmly.

Christian tells John what he needs to do, and we see the wheel sticking out of the wall – “off its axis,” loose, moving back and forth on its own, green light emitting from the crack in the wall. When Locke echoes Ben’s actions by moving the wheel, the white light starts to fill the room. Christian tells John to say hello to his son. “Who’s your son?” Locke asks, but it’s too late. He’s gone. (I wonder if, when Locke visits Jack, he’ll realize that Christian is Jack’s father and will tell Jack that his father is on the island. Maybe that’s what prompts Jack’s sudden change in attitude toward returning.)

Some thoughts after this sequence:

1) Locke moving the wheel caused yet another flash, so wherever Sawyer and the rest wind up next will be a result of Locke’s act. But is his turning of the wheel going to stop the flashes? Or will they continue until the Oceanic Six return? I’ve been assuming that the need for the Oceanic Six to return is about much bigger issues that stopping the time-jumps, which I’ve considered to be an unwelcome side effect of Ben’s exit. The island could stop moving after Locke leaves, but still face dangers that require the return of Jack and Co. If Locke’s departure does stop the island’s time jumping, my guess is that those up above will find themselves smack in the middle of the Dharma era, giving Daniel plenty of time to explore, and setting the stage for Sawyer, Juliet, Jin, Miles (and somewhere Rose and Bernard) to experience their own taste of the Dharma Initiative. Will we see them interact with any familiar faces? Dr. Chang perhaps? Or a young boy named Benjamin Linus?

2) When Locke leaves the island, will he land in the Sahara, like Ben did? And more importantly, when will he land? When Ben left the island, he wound up about eight months in the future. But Jack and the rest are three years in the future from when the island is supposed to be. We don’t know what year they had moved to when Locke turned the wheel. And what’s with the Sahara connection, anyway? Charlotte excavated a Dharma polar bear skeleton there once, so we know the magic wheel was turned at least once before Ben came along and made his little desert drop-in. Why the Sahara?

3) Christian says that Locke, and only Locke, was supposed to move the island. But if everything bad happening on the island is happening because Jack and the rest left, what difference does it make who turned the wheel? If Locke had done it instead, would the island not be in trouble? Would the Oceanic Six not need to come back? How does the fact that Ben moved the island instead of Locke affect what is happening and what’s to come?

4) An injured Locke asks Christian if he can help him up, but Christian just looks at him and says, “No. I’m sorry, I can’t.” He might have said that because he wanted Locke to pick himself up, the way a parent might withhold their support to encourage the child to find their own way. But I had a different interpretation, or at least I wondered about another possibility. Remember Field of Dreams, and how Shoeless Joe Jackson couldn’t cross the line of rocks at the edge of the field? There has been much speculation – and rightly so – about what is going on with Christian Shephard. Is he alive? Dead? Or perhaps somewhere in between? If one of the latter two is true, then he might be literally, physically unable to interact with Locke because he – Christian – is not quite of this world. But then I thought no, that can’t be it, because last year Claire woke up to find Christian holding Aaron.

But then I thought (I really have to stop thinking) that maybe Aaron is special. We have been told that Aaron is meant to play an important role in the endgame of Lost. If the theories about Christian being not-quite-alive are true, what if Aaron is somehow a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead? I’m not sure how that would play out exactly, though another theory I once came across online suggested that Jacob was some sort of spirit in search of a new body, which is why Ben has been trying to stop pregnant women from dying on the island – so that Jacob could have a baby to be born into. (Very Ghostbusters II, isn’t it?) This theory purported that Aaron was to be that body. Then again, Christian – who supposedly represents Jacob – made sure that when he and Claire went off in the jungle, they left Aaron behind, so that wouldn’t seem to make sense. I also wonder, assuming there’s some truth to this theory, if Jacob has been in search of a body for so long that Ben kidnapped baby Alex from Rousseau intending to use her as Jacob’s vessel, only to decide to keep her as his daughter instead and leaving Jacob in perpetual limbo…waiting for a new baby to be born on the island or to arrive there by some other means.

Yes, all of that comes from me wondering about the line, “No. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

5) Christian told Locke in the cabin last season that he can speak for Jacob. But can he? Is Christian really Jacob’s errand boy, or could it be that Christian represents some other force on the island that is in opposition with Jacob? After all, Ben is supposed to have been in Jacob’s service, but Christian asks Locke where listening to Ben has ever gotten him.

Then again, if the theory from #4 is true and Ben has in fact failed Jacob by not providing a baby (or failed him in any way, really; it doesn’t have to fit with the Jacob-needs-a-body theory) then maybe Jacob is done with Ben and looking for someone new to aid him. After all, when Ben first took Locke to Jacob’s cabin in Season Three, Jacob wasn’t so happy to see Ben, and croaked the words, “Help me” to Locke. So maybe Christian does represent Jacob, and his line about Ben just goes to show that Ben has let Jacob down.

Whew…man, we haven’t even dealt with what’s happening off the island yet. Time to do that. Luckily there’s not much to cover. We might get out of here before midnight.

THE FELLOWSHIP IS BROKEN
Ben, Kate, Jack and Sayid are meeting on the pier when Sun suddenly comes marching up with a gun and tells Kate to move away from Ben. As Kate runs to Sun’s car to get Aaron, Sun tells Ben that he is responsible for Jin’s death. (I’ve asked this before, but how does she come to blame Ben? Locke must tell her that Ben killed Keamy, resulting in the freighter exploding. I’m not sure how she’d arrive at that belief any other way.) Ben tells her that Jin is still alive, and he can prove it. Needless to say, this startles her.

Ben: There’s someone, someone here in Los Angeles…let me take you to them and I’ll show you the proof.

Sun: Someone? Who?

Ben: The same person who’s going to show us how to get back to the island.

Kate: Is that what this is about? You knew about this, and that’s why you’re pretending to care about Aaron, to convince me to go back…

Jack: I wasn’t pretending anything…

Kate: This is insane, you guys are crazy.

Kate, with Aaron now in her car, starts to drive off, resisting Jack’s attempts to stop her. Sayid walks away too, saying, “I don’t want any part of this.” He looks to Jack first, then Ben, and says, “And if I see you, or him again, it will be extremely unpleasant for all of us.” (Why you gotta be hatin’ on Jack, Sayid? He didn’t bring you here. All he did was revive you from a horse-tranquilizer injury! How about a thank you?)

It’s just Ben, Jack and Sun now. Ben says that if she comes with him, in 30 minutes she can have proof that Jin is alive. Or she can shoot him and never know. Poor Jack just looks like a kid watching mom and dad have a blow-out. Sun agrees to go, and during the ride, Jack apologizes to her for leaving Jin. She asks why he’s telling her that now, and if he’s going to ask her not to kill Ben if he turns out to be lying. Jack says that for what Ben did to Kate – trying to make her think Aaron was being taken away – he’ll kill him if she doesn’t. Ben looks irritated as he listens to the exchange, and at Jack’s statement he slams on the brakes. “What are you doing? Jack yells. Ben gives it right back, to both of them. “What I’m doing is helping you! And if you had any idea what I’ve had to do to keep you safe, to keep your friends safe, you’d never stop thanking me. You wanna shoot me then shoot me, but let’s get on with it. What’s it gonna be?”

It’s a great moment, and Ben makes his case with such apparent sincerity that we want to believe him. Ben has a finely honed skill for convincing people that he means what he says at any given moment, but we never really know, and he usually turns out be manipulating something. Maybe he has helped them all and gone to great lengths to keep them safe, but to what end? As Sayid told Jack in the hospital during the previous episode, “The only side he’s on is his own.”

The trio arrives outside a church, where Ben pulls out Jin’s ring and hands it to Sun. He tells her he got it from Locke, who got it from Jin before he left the island. Sun asks why Locke didn’t tell her this himself. “I don’t know,” Ben says. “Maybe he never had a chance before he died. I’m sorry I had to bring you here before I gave it to you Sun, but all those people back on the island, Jin included, need our help. There is a woman in this church and she can tell us how to get back to your husband, but we’re running out of time, Sun. So I need you to decide right now: will you come with me?”

She agrees. When Ben mentions that Locke is dead, a look of surprise crosses Sun’s face. Given how quickly everything has happened and the fact that she’s only been in Los Angeles for a few days, is it possible she is just hearing of this for the first time? And did Locke even go to see her, breaking his promise to Jin?

Just after Sun says she’ll go, Desmond walks onto the scene, asking what they’re all doing there. No one quite knows what to make of his arrival, and the look on Ben’s face is particularly ambiguous. Does the sight of Desmond lead Ben to suspect that Penny – who he has threatened to kill – may be nearby? When Ben says he assumes they’re there for the same reason he is, Desmond says, “You’re looking for Faraday’s mother too?” Again, Ben’s face is impossible to read, but Desmond’s words have some kind of impact. Ben finally turns and walks into the church, with the others close behind. A woman inside is lighting candles. “Hello Eloise,” Ben says. The name Eloise gets Desmond’s attention, as he knows that is the name of Faraday’s lab rat. When the woman turns around and he sees who she is…well, I can’t wait to see what happens when they start talking to each other. When she looks at all of them, she makes no sign of recognizing Desmond, so their reactions to one another will have to wait.

“Hello Benjamin,” she says, scanning the small group. “I thought I said all of them.” When Ben says this was the best he could do on short notice, she says, “Well, I suppose it will have to do for now. Alright…let’s get started.” (That’s an awfully low-key reaction considering that her answer to Ben’s earlier question about would happen if he couldn’t bring everybody with him was, “God help us all.”)

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
-So we now know, officially, that Eloise Hawking is Daniel Faraday’s mother. More details about that will surely follow. The next theory in the wings, which I failed to arrive at myself but which I’m certain is correct, is that Eloise Hawking is Ellie, the young Other who marched Daniel, Charlotte and Miles into Richard’s 1950’s camp site and then led Daniel to the H-bomb. And if that proves true, then Eloise interacted with her grown son when she was a young woman. What are the implications of that? Is she his biological mother, or adopted? And if older Eloise Hawking is indeed young Ellie, that would mean she served as an Other with Charles Widmore (who eventually funds Daniel’s work). Yet here she is, assisting Widmore’s sworn enemy, Benjamin Linus. So what is Mrs. Hawking’s role and interest in all of this? Where do her loyalties lie? And how is it that she knows how and when the island can be located?

-It seems that Ben is doing everything that Locke is supposed to be doing, right? Locke was supposed to move the island, but Ben did it instead. Locke is told he must leave the island, reassemble those who left and bring them back. Now Ben is attempting to do that. Are these deliberate actions on Ben’s part, meant to undermine Locke and restore himself to a place of power on the island?

-This has nothing to do with this episode, but it’s a question that suddenly struck me last week, and I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before. When Ben turned the wheel and set off the first flash, Locke was sitting with Richard and all the other Others. But when the flash happened, they all disappeared? But why is that? Locke wasn’t with them in the past or the future; he was with them in the present, so shouldn’t they have moved with him? My shaky theory in this is that although Richard and the gang were there with Locke in his present, they were actually from another time period. What if Richard and the Others traveled through time at some point and made a secret base on the island where they remained…meaning that at any time, there might actually be two Richard Alperts on the island at the same time?

Remember last season when Ben, Locke and Hurley were on their way to the Orchid, and Ben dug up a box with old Saltines, binoculars and a mirror? He held the mirror up to a high batch of trees, reflected the sun to make a signal, and then saw a reflection in return. Later in the episode, Richard and the Others show up and, together with Sayid and Kate, rescue Ben from Keamy and the freighter mercenaries. There’s an odd moment between Ben and Richard, where Ben thanks him for coming, as if he wasn’t sure Richard would have shown up. Richard, in return, tells Ben he’s welcome…but doesn’t look too thrilled to see him. What if that Richard and those Others were of a different era and were hiding out in those trees? If there isn’t some truth to this idea, then I don’t understand why Richard and the Others weren’t still there with Locke when the flashes started.

-Okay, after writing this entire message, including the bullet point above, I came across two things that deal with several of my curiosities. First, a line from this season’s premiere, which I forgot about. When Richard is mending Locke’s leg wound and telling him to bring his people back to the island, Locke asks Richard where he and the Others went when the sky lit up. Richard answered, “I didn’t go anywhere, John; you did.”

Second, I found this Doc Jensen article from Entertainment Weekly, which was posted last week prior to the airing of this episode. It addresses some of the things I question in this message, so check it out if you’re so inclined. It starts to go on a tangent during the “Zero Point” section, but there’s some helpful stuff before that.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I thought last week’s episode might qualify as a Hall of Famer. This one came even closer. I loved it like Robert Duvall loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

LINE OF THE NIGHT
“He’s Korean; I’m from Encino.” – Miles

Tonight’s Episode: 316

BABY MAMA
We begin once again on Penny’s boat, the Searcher, in the days following the rescue of the soon-to-be-dubbed Oceanic Six. In a nice, quiet scene between Kate and Jack, we learn that it was Kate who concocted the Aaron portion of the Oceanic Lie, almost as if she owes taking care of him to those they left behind – dead and alive.

Kate: After everyone that we’ve lost – Michael, Jin and Sawyer – I can’t lose him too.

Jack: Sawyer’s not dead.

Kate: No. But he’s gone.

And so we move back to our new present day, which is three years later. Kate is still staying with Sun in her hotel, and she is about to go see Dan Norton, the lawyer who came to her house asking for blood samples from her and Aaron. She leaves Aaron with Sun, who receives a delivery seconds after Kate’s departure. She opens the package, which contains a file from Surveillance Data Investigations, Inc. that includes a report of some kind, as well as photographs of Jack and Ben outside the funeral home where Locke’s coffin resided. Sun’s envelope also contains a small package – a box of chocolates, and beneath them, a handgun…giving new meaning to the phrase, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.”

I have a theory about Sun’s delivery. I think Ben sent it to her. Remember the small wrapped package he removed from the hotel room heating duct in The Lie a few weeks ago? Jack thinks Sun blames him for Jin’s death, and he told Ben that at the funeral home, so I think Ben is trying to take advantage of it (so un-like Ben, I know) to lure her out and then convince her to return to the island. And if he has friends who run a butcher shop and a carpet business, why not friends who operate a surveillance company? On the other hand, if Sun went looking for a company to spy on Ben, how would it happen that she chose the very company Ben is affiliated with? Still, if I am right, Ben may learn soon enough that Sun blames him for Jin’s death, not Jack. So that should make things interesting when she shows up with her chocolate-scented pistol.

But I digress. Kate goes to see Norton, proposing that she will give the blood samples if she can speak to Norton’s mystery client first. Norton says he’ll take her offer to his client when they meet that afternoon, but tells Kate that he’s quite certain the answer will be no, emphasizing that she is in no position to bargain. He says that while he could summon a sheriff to take the test then and there, his client wants to handle the “exchange of custody” more quietly. He tells Kate she has only herself to blame for the predicament, and warns her to prepare herself: “You are going to lose the boy.”

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES
Jack is at the hospital, still helping Sayid recover his full strength. He has to step outside briefly, and while he’s gone, an orderly comes in to give Sayid his meds. Unfortunately, he tries to deliver those meds in the form of two more tranquilizer darts. But Sayid is too quick and gets the drop on his attacker, roundly kicking his ass and giving him a taste of his own tranquil medicine. Jack re-enters, with Ben, just as Sayid finds a piece of paper in the faux-orderly’s wallet. The paper has an address, which Jack immediately recognizes as Kate’s. He calls her to say she has to get Aaron and leave the house, but she tells him that she’s not home and that Aaron is in a hotel with Sun. Jack makes plans to meet her, while Ben prepares for another task.

Ben: Good, I’ll go deal with Hugo.

Sayid: Sorry Ben, I’m not letting you get anywhere near him.

Ben: You have friends in trouble; let’s get them to safety and save the dirty linen for later.

Yeah, we still don’t know what happened between Sayid and Ben. We still don’t know much about their arrangement at all, in fact. Who are the people Sayid was killing? And why is he not killing for Ben anymore? Though they take off together in Ben’s van, those answers will have to wait.

Jack finds Kate parked in her car on a downtown street, staking out Norton’s office. She reluctantly tells him what’s going on, and when she sees Norton drive out of the building, she tells Jack to get in if he wants to keep talking. He does, and off they go. They follow Norton to a motel, where they see him climb a flight of stairs, knock on a door and hand an envelope to a woman: Claire’s mother.

You watched it, so you know that Claire’s mother turned out to be in town because she had sued Oceanic and was collecting her settlement. She knew nothing about Aaron. But her appearance raised a couple of questions for me. I’ve been under the impression that Jack never shared with Kate the details of his first encounter with Ms. Littleton – about his father, the affair, Claire being his sister, even that the woman was Claire’s mother. Yet when Kate sees her from the car, and based on the dialogue with Jack that follows, she knows the woman is Claire’s mother. So if I’m wrong, and Jack did tell Kate who she was, wouldn’t he have had to explain his relationship to Claire…and to Aaron? How else would he make sense of Claire’s mother showing up at his father’s funeral? And if he didn’t mention Claire at all and instead just described the woman as someone who’d had an affair with his father, how would Kate now know that the woman is Claire’s mother?

My curiosity over this is that it would be a pretty big deal for Kate to know that Jack is Aaron’s blood relative, and I’ve never had the impression that she’s aware of it. I’ve always interpreted the pointed dialogue on this issue to be clever wordplay on the part of the writers. In last season’s episode Something Nice Back Home, for example, Jack and Kate are arguing and she reprimands him for his increased drinking and says she can’t have that kind of behavior around her son. Jack yells, “You’re not even related to him!” I didn’t get from that scene that she caught the true meaning of that. Or in this episode, when Jack offers to go up and talk to Claire’s mother, he says, “Aaron is my family too.” Kate cries a bit at this, seemingly moved by Jack’s statement…but it didn’t seem to me that she got more from that, or was acknowledging his true relationship to the boy. I assumed she was just touched that he feels that way. So…am I wrong? Does Kate know that Jack is Aaron’s real uncle? Or did the writer’s mess up? And perhaps the most relevant question: who the hell cares? Did I really just spend two fat paragraphs talking about this non-issue?

Yes. Yes I did. Further evidence of my sad state of mind. Or a relevant point that will eventually allow me say, “I told you so.”

Getting back to more overtly important matters, Ben and Sayid pull their van into an underground parking garage, where none other than Dan Norton meets them and hands Ben some papers relating to the charges against Hurley. He explains that they won’t stick and that the big man should be free the next day.

I’m not sure how he justifies going there, but Jack gets Kate to drive to the Long Beach pier, and upon arrival, they meet up with Ben and Sayid…much to Kate’s surprise and anger (toward Ben, not Sayid. And can I just say that I loved Naveen Andrews’ performance in this scene? The look on his face toward Kate and the way he leaned against the van, all as if to say, “Here we are again…and don’t look at me.”). Jack can see Kate is furious to find Ben there, and he tries to explain without undoing the progress he’s made with her that day (seeing as the last time they saw each other was that night at the airport where he was yelling that they “have to go back!” and she was pretty much disgusted by the sight of him). He tries to tell her that Ben is there to help them, that they all need to be together again so they can go back to the island, but he doesn’t get far before realization strikes Kate.

Kate: It’s him! It’s him, he’s the one who’s trying to take Aaron!

Jack: No, no, you don’t understand…

Ben: No Jack, she’s right. It was me. Sorry. [Classic Ben!!]

Kate: Who the hell do you think you are? Why don’t you just stay away, why don’t you leave me and my son alone?

Ben: Because he’s not your son, Kate.

I love the way he says it, because it really is delivered like a reality check. Just after her trial ended, Kate told Jack that she’d heard him tell the lie about the plane crash so many times that she worried he was starting to believe it. Well, Kate’s comfort playing the role of Aaron’s mother shows she is just as committed to a lie as Jack is.

Whatever is said between them all after that, we don’t hear. The POV switches to that of an unseen watcher, looking on from a car just a few spaces away. And in that car is Sun, with Aaron in the backseat…and her newly delivered gun in the front. She picks it up and gets out of the car. Cliffhanger!!

THE NOSEBLEED SECTION
We pick up with our friends on the island right where we left them, with Charlotte unconscious and the others nervous and agitated. Juliet asks Daniel if he knew this was going to happen to her.

Daniel: I thought it might. I think it’s neurological. Our brains have an internal clock, a sense of time. The flashes throw the clock  off. It’s like really bad jetlag.

Juliet: Jetlag doesn’t make you hemorrhage, Daniel. Tell me why it isn’t happening to the rest of us.

Daniel: I don’t know. But thank God it’s not.

While the two of them and Miles are occupied with the red-nosed redhead, Locke tells Sawyer that they need to return to The Orchid station, suggesting they use the zodiac raft on the beach to expedite the trip around the island. Sawyer is skeptical, but Locke thinks that if he can figure out what Ben did there that allowed him to leave the island, then he can do it too…and save them all.

Locke: This is all happening because they left. I think it’ll stop if I can bring them back.

Sawyer: Bring who back?

Locke: Jack. Sun, Sayid, Hugo, Kate.

Sawyer: The boat blew up and that chopper was probably on it!

Locke: They’re not dead, James.

Sawyer: Says who?

Locke: That doesn’t matter. What matters is they have to come back. I have to make them come back. Even if it kills me.

In thinking about this “it’s all happening because they left” mindset, we should remember that before everything went to shit – that is, before the freighter blew up – Ben released Kate and Sayid, who were in the captivity of Richard and the Others. Before heading off to The Orchid to move the island, he told them they were free to take the chopper and go. So if he was okay with them leaving then, what happened to make their return so essential to the island’s survival? Did he release them thinking that they wouldn’t have time to get out of the island’s grasp before he moved it? If their presence on the island is so important, why did he let them go?

Charlotte soon wakes up, and other than not recognizing Daniel at first, she seems okay for the time being. So the crew begins the long walk back to the beach to get the raft and make for The Orchid.

“TIME TRAVEL’S A BITCH”
Their journey gets interesting that night when they see a beam of light shooting into the sky off in the distance. Locke realizes almost immediately what it is, which Daniel picks up on, asking if he knows when they are. Locke just cautions them all to keep moving. Miles gets a slight nosebleed while they walk, and then they hear a woman’s screams in the jungle. Sawyer goes to investigate and finds Kate delivering Claire’s baby.  He watches transfixed, and just after Aaron’s birth, the next flash comes and takes him away.

Sawyer doesn’t tell the others what he saw when they regroup, but Locke knows he must have seen one of their own, and shares with Sawyer how he knows about the source of the light beam. Miles, meanwhile, alarms Daniel with news of his nosebleed and asks why only some of them are affected.

Miles: Why her? Why me?

Daniel: I don’t know. I think it might have something to do with duration of exposure, you know, the amount of time spent on the island.

Miles: That doesn’t make any sense, those yahoos have been here for months. I’ve never been here before two weeks ago.
Daniel: Are you sure about that?

An interesting point. It’s been pretty much spelled out that Charlotte has been to the island before, though we don’t yet know how or when. But what of Miles? I’ve heard speculation out there on the internets that Miles might be the son of Dr. Pierre Chang, star of all your favorite Dharma orientation videos. In the very first scene of this season’s premiere, Chang wakes up in his island home and tends to an infant son. Could the internets be right? Might that son be Miles?

The group arrives back on the beach to find the camp site is there, indicating that they aren’t in the past. But the place is deserted and in disarray – empty Dharma beer cans litter the table, Vincent’s leash is on the ground and the zodiac raft is gone. Clearly they’re in the near future…but how near? The biggest surprise they find is an outrigger canoe sitting on the beach, empty save for the oars and a water bottle bearing the label Ajira Airways. Juliet doesn’t recognize the canoe as belonging to the Others, but she has heard of the airline, remarking, “They’re based in India but they fly everywhere.”

This marks the first mention of Ajira on the show itself, but a few months back, in the ramp-up to the season premiere, a music video was released for a song by The Fray, and it was done as a tie-in to Lost, complete with clips and two subliminal flashes of the Ajira logo, signaling perhaps that the airline would play an important role in things to come (I speculated that the airline might be tied to Sun’s father). The question, for the time being, is who does the bottle – and the canoe – belong to?

They aren’t waiting to find out. The group takes the canoe and begins the long ride around the island to The Orchid. Unfortunately, they can’t catch a break; early in the journey, another craft appears and its occupants start shooting. Juliet fires back, and in a stroke of perfect timing, another flash comes and brings them to safety. Or, you know, not. They find themselves in the midst of a tumultuous nighttime storm and start rowing for the shore. They make it back, and while catching their breath, Sawyer notices Juliet’s nose bleeding, a grim discovery which precedes a more curious one: wreckage – apparently fresh – from another vessel. They find a French label on the side of a container.

Somewhere out in the stormy waters, six or seven people sit in a raft, speaking French to each other. They notice something floating in the water nearby. It appears to be a human body on a piece of flat paneling. They reach it and pull the figure onto the raft, turning it over to reveal…oh yeah, baby: Jin is back.

They too make it to shore, and the next morning, with the sun now shining, Jin wakes up. A woman from the raft tends to him, offering him water and trying to speak to him in English. He can speak well enough to say that he was on a boat that sank, but he’s too weak to say much else. The kind woman stands up and removes a cloak, revealing a pregnant belly. She introduces herself to Jin, who recognizes the name: Danielle Rousseau.

Time travel’s a bitch.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
-So Dan Norton works for Ben. But exclusively? Kate was right to ask about the coincidence that the same attorney handling Ms. Littleton’s lawsuit just happens to represent the mystery client trying to take Aaron away…a mystery client whose identity she soon learns. Is there more of a connection than meets the eye between Norton’s clients?

-Reintroducing Claire’s mother was a cool red herring, but it didn’t really further the story, did it? I’m enjoying seeing where the stories go, but I do feel like the writers and producers are definitely stretching out the reunion of the Oceanic Six. How much more padding we’ll get remains to be seen, but with Sun currently in Los Angeles, how much longer could it really take them all together? And once they’re all onboard with the plan, how long will it take them to get back to the island?

-Of course, the appearance of Claire’s mother, coupled with an appearance by Claire herself when Sawyer finds himself witnessing Aaron’s birth, was a clever way to keep her in our thoughts while she is MIA this season. In fact, the writers made a smart move by having the time-tripping castaways land on that particular night in the island’s history. It was a significant night for many characters on the show – Locke, Kate, Claire, Charlie, Sayid, Shannon, Jack…and I’d say it was pretty damn significant for Boone, seeing as he died. The Season One episodes that cover those events are Deus Ex Machina (which ends with the Locke pounding on the hatch and the beam of light shooting up) and Do No Harm, in which Claire gives birth, Boone dies and Sayid and Shannon spend their first night together. The Little Prince offered a welcome dose of nostalgia by referencing that particular episode, in which nearly every main character factored prominently into the action (Jin, Sun, Michael and Hurley also played big roles in Do No Harm; only Sawyer, Walt and Locke were not heavily featured). In many ways, The Little Prince felt like a Season One installment, and it probably goes in my Lost episode Hall of Fame. It had great storytelling, great writing, and great performances (particularly from Josh Holloway and Terry O’Quinn).

-There was no mention in this episode of Ben’s visit to Mrs. Hawking, or her warning that he had only 70 hours to reassemble the Oceanic Six (though he did tell Jack to hurry when they split up to go after Kate and Hurley, respectively). When will we see her again, and what will we learn about her when we do? Is she indeed Daniel’s mother?

-If we can assume the island has been moved before, should we also assume that the flashes are a natural result of such a move? And can we also assume that multiple flashes occurred, just like this time? If so, how were they stopped? And if the flashes didn’t happen at all, why now? And if the flashes are happening now because Jack and company left, well, what the hell does that have to do with anything?

-Last week, when I was listing all the boats and planes that have crashed into the island, I forgot to mention Rousseau’s ship. How appropriate that this episode would remind us of that fact…

-The return of Jin was a nice surprise, in that it came much earlier in the season than I expected. I thought we’d be eight episodes or so in before he reappeared. Now that he’s back, how soon will he make sense of the time-tripping, and how long will it be before he finds Sawyer and the rest?

SECOND BEST LINE OF THE NIGHT (I used the best line twice already; I’m sure you can figure it out)…
“Great, maybe they got a flight outta here to Vegas tonight.” – Sawyer

Tonight’s Episode: This Place is Death

I have been watching Lost since the show premiered on September 22, 2004, and I have never lost my faith. I’ve witnessed other friends, who were as excited by it as I was in the early days, fall by the wayside when their questions didn’t get answered quickly enough or when the story started to get “too weird” for them. Fine. Let them stare blankly at vapid reality shows with one hand in the chip bowl and the other down their pants. While their brains slowly turn into Velveeta, mine is sharpened by the puzzle I’m trying to assemble. Not getting answers fast enough? Grow a pair! This is serialized television. It’s a complex story meant to unfold over several seasons – a concept that doesn’t lend itself to instant gratification. If only they could muster a little patience, they would be rewarded; ask any Harry Potter fan.

But I have to say, as the latest episode was nearing its second half-hour, I started to get a little frustrated. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying it; there were some genius line readings, and more twists on the flashback/flashforward structure. All cool. But there were also more scenes of our weary survivors being confronted by more rifle-toting mystery folk, more marching through the jungle as this one demands to know how they got here and how many others there are while that one demands to know what they’re doing there…and I thought, is this what Season Five is going be? Is it really going to take a whole season to get the Oceanic Six back to the island? Are we just dragging things out because we can’t reveal all our Big Mysteries until Season Six? Mysteries like what is the Black Smoke? Who is Jacob? Why does the island have the powers it does? What is the history between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore? How does Richard Alpert look so young and healthy when he seems to be 149 years old?

And then, a bit past the 50 minute mark, something happened that made me bolt upright on the couch and exclaim something along the lines of, “No fucking way!!” And in the remaining minutes, two more things happened that led me, by the end, to feel ashamed that my faith had faltered even briefly.

Here are the three things that happened.

1) John Locke met Charles Widmore.

2) I learned the name of Desmond and Penny’s son.

3) John Locke told Richard Alpert when and where he was born.

So with that….

THE SEEKER
After waking up on the boat one night with a sudden memory from the island of Daniel, Desmond set a course for Oxford to find Daniel’s mother. Penny is not happy that Desmond is bringing them back to London, within reach of her father. “Don’t underestimate him, Desmond. If he finds out we’re here I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“This has nothing to do with your father, Penny,” he tells her. “We’re here because of Daniel Faraday.” He says he’s the only one who can help those still on the island, and promises her he’ll be back that night and then he’ll be done with all of this. “If you’re gonna promise me something Des, will you promise me that you’ll never go back to that island again?” Penny says, concern in her voice. “Why in God’s name would I want to go back there?” he replies.

I don’t know yet Desmond, but I have a feeling something will come up. And I’m really worried for Penny.

Upon arriving at Oxford, Desmond is told that the university has no record of Daniel Faraday. Remembering where Daniel’s lab was, Desmond finds the room, which is sealed shut with a “Danger: Fumigation” sticker. He busts in and finds the remnants of Faraday’s work. The chalkboard, now blank; the maze through which the rat Eloise ran in his experiments; the overhead lamp. He also finds a framed photograph of Faraday standing with a pretty young woman. But his investigation is interrupted when a maintenance man enters, remarking that he wondered how long his fumigation ruse would hold up. He says that Desmond is not the first to come poking around asking questions about Faraday and his work – work which was rumored to involve sending rats brains through time.

This comment helped remind me of something which I think we need to keep in mind, and which was mentioned by Doc Jensen from Entertainment Weekly in a portion of his article which I included in one of last week’s messages. There are two types of time travel happening in Lost. There’s the kind we’re used to seeing in time travel stories, where individuals physically move through time and find themselves in different locations, like what’s happening to the people on the island. But there is also the kind where only one’s consciousness moves through time, while the body stays behind. This is the kind of time travel Desmond experienced in The Constant; his body remained on the freighter with Sayid in 2004, but his mind was bouncing back and forth between the freighter and his army days in 1996. I figure this is an important distinction as time goes on, no pun inten…oh who am I kidding? Pun totally intended.

The time travel of consciousness brings us to the next part of Desmond’s journey. Before he left the lab at Oxford, he told the maintenance man that the university had no record of Faraday. “Can you blame them?” the man asks. “After what he done to that poor girl?”

Desmond goes to see this girl – the same one from the cracked picture frame, I assume – named Teresa Spencer. Her sister Abigail answers the door, and invites Desmond in to “speak to” Teresa when she learns that Desmond got Teresa’s name from Faraday. Abigail leads him into a room where Teresa is bedridden, vacant, hooked up to machines. Abigail says Teresa can’t hear them; that’s she’s “away.” Apparently she wakes up not knowing where…make that when...she is. She’ll be talking like she’s three years old, or speaking to their father who died five years earlier. Abigail is plain in her disdain for Faraday, who she says abandoned Teresa in this condition and ran off to the states. She then praises Mr. Widmore for all he’s done to help.

Sorry, let me rewind my DVR and twist a few Q-Tips in my ear because for a second there it sounded like you just said “Mr. Widmore.”

When Desmond questions the name, Abigail describes Widmore as Daniel’s benefactor. “He funded his research for ten years and then took responsibility for the result of it. He’s been taking care of Teresa ever since this happened.”

Whoa. So what does this leave us chewing on? The biggest reveal is obviously that of a direct connection between Faraday and Charles Widmore. This makes for the closest thing we have to a confirmation that Matthew Abbaddon, who selected the team of scientists for the freighter, indeed works for/with Widmore. And the fact that Widmore is funding Faraday’s research takes on an even more fascinating dimension later in the episode…but we’ll get to that in good time.

But we’re not done yet. “He funded Daniel’s research and then took responsibility for the result of it.” So Teresa’s condition is the result of what Faraday was studying. What was the relationship between Daniel and this girl Teresa? Were they colleagues? Lovers? What exactly happened to her? Based on Abigail’s explanations of her behavior, Teresa seems to be exhibiting the same symptoms Desmond was in The Constant. But at the same time, not quite. For one thing, when Desmond’s consciousness returned to 2006, he knew where he was, even if he didn’t understand how he got there. But it seems that Teresa wakes up talking as if she is still someplace/sometime else. Furthermore, Teresa has been like this for years, it would seem. Yet we saw what happened to Minkowski on the freighter when his consciousness was leaping through time. The experience seemed to fry his brain in a matter of days. So what’s the difference between what happened to him and what happened to Teresa?

Does Widmore have an ulterior motive for providing Teresa’s care? Does Faraday know that Widmore is taking care of her? Why did he leave? Was it really out of callousness, or was something more complex at the heart of it? Did he love her? And if he did, has he truly forgotten about her and fixed his affection on….ahhh, but again I get ahead of myself.

THE IN-LAWS
After promising Penny that they would be in and out of London and that her father would never know they were there, the revelation of a Faraday/Widmore connection is too much for him. He barges into Widmore’s office looking for answers. “I know you have questions for me,” Desmond says. “I’m not here to answer them. I’ve come here to ask you something, and once you’ve told me everything I need to know, you’ll never see me again.”  Though Widmore is a man who plays things close to the vest, we can guess that he was not expecting Desmond’s question to be about the whereabouts of Daniel Faraday’s mother. Widmore says he hasn’t seen his daughter in three years and asks if she’s safe. But Desmond stays on topic, so Widmore takes a moment to consider and then tells him that Faraday’s mother is in Los Angeles. He removes an address book and writes down the address. “I suspect she won’t be pleased to see you. She’s a very private person.” (Though given that she and Desmond have met before, she might not be opposed to a repeat visit.)

This is the second time Desmond has asked Widmore to provide him with contact information for someone (the first was Penny in The Constant) and it’s the second time Widmore has obliged. But why? Why not tell Desmond to fuck off? He’s never approved of Desmond for Penny, and he worries about Desmond’s role in this little drama. “Deliver your message, and then get out of this mess,” he says before Desmond exits. “Don’t put Penny’s life in danger. You’re getting yourself involved in something that goes back many, many years. It has nothing to do with you or my daughter. Wherever you were hiding…go back there.”

When Desmond returns to the boat that night, he tells Penny that Faraday’s mother died a few years earlier. She asks why he’s lying to her, and he says that it’s over; he’s done with the island. She wonders what will happen the next time he wakes up with a memory, and the time after that. “I’ll forget it,” he says. “It doesn’t matter, Pen. You’re my life now. You and Charlie. I won’t leave you again. Not for this. Not for anything.”

Oh yes. Charlie. I neglected to mention that Desmond and Penny have a son now. A cute little boy who will have an awesome accent someday. And his name is Charlie. I can’t tell you how much that made me smile. Desmond and Penny named their little boy after Charlie. Charlie, who died so that Desmond could live and someday reunite with his love. Charlie, who Penny briefly communicated with, passing on critical information that Charlie was able to relay to Desmond in his final moments. Charlie. Awwwww, Charlieeeeeeeeee!!!!

Anyway, Penny knows that Desmond will not be able to truly move on, so she agrees to accompany him wherever he needs to go…which makes me worry about her even more. Next stop: Los Angeles.

OTHERS: THE EARLY YEARS
Our next stop is the island, where the story picks up post flaming-arrow attack. Miles, Daniel and Charlotte are captured by a group of people wearing what looks like a cross between military fatigues and the jungle chic that the Others wore in the Season Two days. Led by a pymgy-ish girl named Ellie, they are marched off into the jungle.

Charlotte’s symptoms – headache, dizziness, etc. – are getting worse and Daniel is worried. But he says that nothing is happening to her; that he won’t let anything happen to her. Probably not the smartest thing to say Danny Boy, since something is definitely happening to her and there probably ain’t a whole hell of a lot you can do about it. (In fact, the boys over at Entertainment Weekly theorize that your actions on the island are altering the future and causing Charlotte to be erased from existence.) As they walk, Miles has one of his “I sense dead people” moments and tells Daniel that they’ve just passed a fresh grave – four U.S. soldiers, three of them shot, one of them dead from radiation poisoning.

The trio is led to an encampment of tents, and out of one comes Richard Alpert, who asks the prisoners if they’ve come back for their bomb. Daniel has seen and heard enough to surmise that there is an active hydrogen bomb on the island, placing them sometime in the 1950’s, when the U.S. was testing bombs on islands in this region. Richard and the others assume that Daniel and everybody else from the beach are with the U.S. military. He makes it clear that his people didn’t start this aggression. “You come to our island to run your tests, you fire on us and what, you expect us not to defend ourselves?” Daniel says that he’s a scientist and doesn’t know anything about that. He says that if he isn’t allowed to neutralize the bomb, everyone on the island could die. Richard asks how he can trust that Daniel isn’t on a suicide mission. “Because,” Daniel says, “I’m in love with the woman sitting next to me and I would never…I would never do anything to hurt her.” Charlotte is taken aback, and Richard agrees to let Daniel deal with the bomb.

I gotta say, Richard seems like a reasonable man. More evidence of that comes later in the episode, but considering all the crazy things that happen around him, he genuinely listens to those worthy of his suspicion, and he gives fair consideration to what they say. Of course, he is as old as the universe itself, so I imagine logging that kind of time would eventually lead one to a pretty Zen state of mind.

Meanwhile, thanks to Locke’s well-timed arrival, Sawyer and Juliet have two of their attackers still alive – one of whom is the guy who had threatened to cut off Juliet’s hand. His uniform bears the name “Jones.” Locke tries to get them to talk, which they do…but to each other, in another language. Juliet readily interprets, explaining to Sawyer and Locke that they were speaking Latin. Not-Jones asked, “Why aren’t they in uniform?” and Jones replies, “Shut up!” Juliet says they know Latin for the same reason she does: they’re Others. She tells them, in Latin, that she and her people are not the enemy, and asks to be taken to their camp. She speaks to Not-Jones and asks if “Ricardo Alpert” is there. He wasn’t expecting that…nor was Locke. Juliet calmly, politely asks if he will lead them to Richard. She convinces him, but just as he starts to give directions, Jones snaps his neck and runs off into the jungle. Locke raises the commandeered rifle, but doesn’t fire. “Why didn’t you shoot him?” an incredulous Sawyer demands. “Because he’s one of my people,” says Locke – an unexpected yet somehow understandable answer.

MR. JONES
As Richard is releasing Daniel to go fix the bomb situation (under Ellie’s supervision), Jones comes tearing into the camp telling Richard that he was captured but managed to escape. He sees Daniel, and urges Richard not to trust him even as Richard sends him and Ellie on their way. Richard asks Jones how he knows he wasn’t followed. “Their leader is some sodding old man,” Jones fires back. “What, you think he can track me? You think he knows this island better than I do?” Let me answer both questions with one word: yes. Sure enough, there’s Locke up on a hill overlooking the camp, with Sawyer and Juliet.

Locke: How did you know Richard would be here?

Juliet: Richard’s always been here.

Locke: How old is he?

Juliet: Old.

While Sawyer and Juliet go after Daniel, who they see being marched away from the camp, Locke walks right into the middle of it, calling for Richard. Jones watches him in disbelief, a “how the fuck did you get here?” look on his face. He grabs a rifle and points it at Locke’s back, ordering him to stop just as Richard re-emerges from a tent to see what’s going on. Locke gives Richard his name, but just as Richard had told him would happen, the name means nothing to him. So Locke says, “Jacob sent me.”

There were a whole bunch of scenes in this episode where one person says something that catches a second person quite by surprise. This was yet another.

Jones still has his rifle up, and his trigger finger is itchy. I’m not sure if he heard the Jacob comment, but seeing that Richard is willing to listen to what the “sodding old man” has to say, he angrily chimes in. “Richard, you can’t seriously trust him.” When Jones doesn’t lower his gun as instructed, Richard walks over and physically pushes it out of the way. “I said put the gun down, Widmore.”

Insert visual of me shaking my head from side to side really fast like a Looney Tunes character, accompanied by a goofy sound effect.

“Your name is Widmore?” Locke asks. “Charles Widmore?”
“What’s it to you?” the man snaps back.

Holy. Shit.

Charles Widmore is on the island. He’s an Other, somewhere in his 20’s.

Holy. Shit.

DROPPING BOMBS
The episode gives us little time to digest this. Ellie and Faraday have reached the bomb…and they weren’t kidding around: it’s a big, honkin’ hydrogen bomb, suspended two stories above ground from a derrick, the name “Jughead” affectionately painted on the side. After examining it and noticing a small leak, Faraday hustles back down to the ground and tells Ellie that they need to seal up the crack with lead or concrete and then bury the bomb. She doesn’t trust him, and insists on knowing how he knows that burying it will solve the problem. He finally tells her he knows because the island is still there 50 years later; no bomb has gone off. He starts to explain where/when he and his people have come from, when Sawyer and Juliet show up. Outnumbered, Ellie lowers her gun and they head back to the camp.

Camp…where Locke is now trying to explain his situation to Richard. He gives Richard the compass which Richard gave to him in a previous time flash…but Richard is understandably skeptical.

Richard: I’m not sure what you expect me to say, John Locke.

Locke: I expect you to tell me how to get off the island.

Richard: That’s very privileged information, why would I do that?

Locke tries to explain that in the future he’s described, Richard has told him that he needs to leave the island to do something important, and that he – Locke – is the leader of Richard’s people in the future. “Well look, I certainly don’t want to contradict myself, but we have a very specific process for selecting our leadership, and it starts at a very, very young age.”

We have a very specific process for selecting our leadership. “WE” WHO?!? What are they doing there that would require a leader chosen under such special circumstances, and at such a young age?

Richard tells Locke that they are in the year 1954. “Alright. Alright, May 30th, 1956, two years from now, that’s the day I’m born,” Locke says. “Tustin, California. And if you don’t believe me, I suggest you come and visit me.”

Which, we know from last season, is just what Richard does. First at the hospital, and later at one of his foster homes, spreading multiple objects out before ‘Lil Locke and asking him to choose the thing that “belongs to him already.” Among the objects? The compass.

Unfortunately for Locke, the next flash occurs just after this, before he can convince Richard to give him instructions for getting off the island. When the light subsides, Richard, Widmore, the tents, the bomb, Ellie – all gone. Daniel, Juliet and Sawyer have just arrived back, and Miles and Charlotte are visible now too. Daniel frees them from their wrist binds, but no sooner than Charlotte smiles at her freedom – and Daniel’s return – does she begin to convulse. Blood pours from her nose, and she collapses onto the ground. Unconscious? Or worse?

LOOSE ENDS
-Let’s start with Widmore. From the beginning, this guy is a cocky, arrogant prick with a short fuse. He shows little respect for Richard’s authority and clearly thinks he knows better; he completely underestimates Locke; and he claims intimate familiarity with the island. But how did he come to be there in the first place? When and why will he leave? The Dharma Initiative doesn’t come to the island until the 1970’s, or maybe late 60’s. Is Widmore still there when Dharma arrives, or do he and Ben meet back in the world somewhere? Widmore once said to Ben, “Everything you have you took from me.” Does Widmore rise to a position of power within the Others?

-When Widmore arrives back at camp after escaping, he has a brief encounter with Faraday. Though he doesn’t learn Faraday’s name, he definitely gets a look at him. So years later, when he starts funding Faraday’s research, does he recognize him from the island? Faraday has said that they can’t change the past. “Whatever happened…happened,” he said. But is he sure about that? I suspect that we don’t fully know yet what Lost’s rules of time travel are. So when Sawyer, Daniel and the others move through time, do their interactions in the past change the course of the future? Does older Widmore seek out Faraday and offer to fund him because he knows that Faraday’s work will eventually lead him to the island? These questions of time travel fascinate and baffle me to no end.

-Another question I had after this episode involves the island and how people get to it. We know that it has a habit of making things crash on it: the Black Rock; the cargo plane with Eko’s brother; Desmond’s boat; Flight 815. We also know that it’s a hard place to find, and is actually invisible from above. So how was the U.S. military able to land there to test bombs? How does the Dharma Initiative find it years later? Is the island always hard to find, or does man’s involvement/interference/presence make it hard to find? Do its inhabitants somehow actively keep it hidden?

-When John tells Richard about the time traveling, Richard doesn’t respond like someone who is already familiar with the concept. So can we assume that at that point in history, he is not aware of the island’s time-travel-enabling properties? When will those be discovered, and by whom? How did Dr. Chang know about the “limitless energy” near which The Orchid was being built?

GUEST COLUMNIST
Reader David E. sent me the following amusing e-mail last week, and I felt it was well worth including here:

Do you think there is any website that has a body count for these two guys?  I think it would be interesting to see which man has killed more people and/or been directly responsible for their deaths.  Just think about it…it’s like a really bad action movie.

Ben
All the people Sayid killed for him.
Dharma initiative (including his own father….his own father!)
How many have the others killed on his behalf?
Michael killed two people for Ben.
He shot Locke…that should count for at least a half.
I’m sure I’m missing a bunch.

Charles
The survivors/extras that the freighter people killed.
Bomb on boat.
That kid whose neck he broke.
Ben’s daughter.
Almost Desmond’s spirit….that only counts as half as well.

Any idea who’s in the lead on this one?

Nope, no idea Dave. Sorry. Maybe you should start that site.

LINE OF THE NIGHT
“Are they from the future too?” – Ellie

FINAL THOUGHTS
The clips that were shown for tonight’s episode lead me to suspect that a new twist is about to be introduced into the island’s time shifts. I think our friends are going to land in a time on the island when they are already there, meaning they will see themselves and/or their fellow 815 survivors living through some of the events that took place during earlier seasons. We’ll see in a few hours if I’m right…

Tonight’s Episode: The Little Prince