I Am DB

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