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MOLE RAT: Michael tried to make up for betraying his fellow castaways by blowing up his shipmates

It turns out that Michael, who is indeed Ben’s spy on the freighter, can’t be killed; plus, Ben gives more details on the Others-Widmore war and sends Rousseau and Karl off to their death

I’m nervous, dear readers. This wasn’t your average Lost episode. That much was clear from the start, when the ”previously on Lost” recap began by reaching allllll the way back to Michael’s season-1-capping scream for his son (i.e., ”Waaaalt!”). For another, we spent almost the entire episode within Michael’s how-I-came-to-be-on-the-boat flashback, bookended by some Linus-Rousseau family psychodrama. And there’s the whole no-more-Lost-for-five-weeks thing.

All right. For the most part, I dug this episode, and most of the credit for its success should go directly to Harold Perrineau. For the two seasons he was on the show, my feelings for his character varied from minimal interest to outright dislike. That was less Perrineau’s fault than the writers’; they never figured out how to make Michael Dawson interesting beyond his rather mild alienation from his son, Waaaalt! — sorry, Walt — and his understandable-if-monotonous determination to get him back from the Others. But unrelenting guilt over murdering two innocent women and betraying your friends and fellow survivors, guilt that drives you to confess your sins to your son and profoundly, perhaps irrevocably, alienate him from you? Now that is a gangbusters character motivation, and Perrineau made the most of it, layering in despair, grief, shock, outrage, and resignation, often all at once. For the first time, I truly, deeply cared about what was going to happen to the guy, and early, too: When Michael intentionally crashed his car just as the opening credits had finished, I felt relieved knowing he still had to be alive, or else, you know, there’d be no episode.

Perrineau’s performance was so strong, in fact, that it almost distracted me from a few glaring plot holes in his extended flashback — almost. First, of course, is the fact that we still don’t know what happened to Michael and Walt between when they left the Island — which, according to various Lost time lines, occurred somewhere around Thanksgiving 2004 — and when they reached New York City. The freshness of Michael’s mother’s anger at him (not to mention Michael’s anger at himself) would suggest he’d only recently dropped Walt off at her doorstep, which makes sense given all the Christmas decorations around her house. But it also means that Doc Jensen’s theory that Michael and Walt traveled back in time when they left the Island now looks unlikely. So how could father and son go from a dinky boat in the South Pacific to whatever ”rescue” Ben promised them to Manhattan in what could be as little as ten days? And if Michael and Walt are keeping their real, Oceanic 815-surviving identities a secret, wouldn’t it be a bit difficult reentering the U.S. without proper ID? And for that matter, wouldn’t Michael know his suicide-by-car-crash note to Walt would never reach his son if he wasn’t wearing any ID? For these questions alone, I hope Michael doesn’t fulfill his death wish anytime soon, because I suspect some of the answers have to do with the evidently bottomless resources of the participants in the Others-Widmore war. If it really is a war.

Which brings us to the return of Tom, a.k.a. Mr. Friendly. Actually, it was neat to see the resurrection of several departed characters: Naomi, George Minkowski, Mrs. Klugh (in the ”previously on” recap), and especially Libby — but I’ll get to her in a bit, because I really want to talk about good old Grizzly first. Was I the only one who hooted with glee when Michael walked in on Tom entertaining a handsome gentleman named Arturo? ”I don’t make it to the mainland too often,” Tom said with a puckish glint, ‘’so when I do, I like to indulge myself.” Hoot! See, even before Tom cryptically told Kate back in season 3 that she wasn’t his type, I’d been irked to no end that this cast — as diverse as any that’s ever been on television — didn’t have a single gay character, so this moment was especially satisfying for me.

But Tom didn’t show up just to complete Lost’s Benetton dance card. He also reinforced three major elements of the show’s mythos: He told Michael (1) that some of the Others can leave the Island whenever they want, (2) that the Island won’t let Michael kill himself, and (3) that Charles Widmore faked the Oceanic 815 crash by buying an old Boeing 777, filling it with bodies dug up from a Thai cemetery, and sinking it in an ocean trench.

Now, the first one I believe, though I do think the timing of Friendly’s appearance in Manhattan against his death on the Island at most only two weeks later is a bit…fuzzy. And as for the other two, well, I dunno. It seemed to me that the Island did make itself known at least through the reappearance of Libby; for a moment there in the hospital, Michael seemed to be channeling some earlier patient of Libby’s, and I don’t think it was just Michael’s mind dancing a guilt-ridden tarantella with his subconscious. Would the Island have stopped Friendly from shooting Michael too? was Michael’s consciousness also hopping through time, or was Libby’s cameo more on the order of a dead Charlie showing up to slap some sense into Hurley? — the more confused I get.

The more I think about Charles Widmore as a merciless Lex Luthorian villain, meanwhile, the less I’m convinced. First of all, a quick DVR pause on that invoice for the ”old” 777 plane — a model that was only ten years old in 2004 — reveals Widmore purchased it for $450,000. Which is a bargain considering Boeing’s website quotes the cheapest new 777 at $200 million. That’s not to say that Widmore definitively isn’t behind the fake Oceanic 815 wreckage. Just that Friendly’s ”proof” smelled bogus to me. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if we don’t have an Emperor Palpatine situation going on here, i.e., a mastermind playing both sides of a faux war against each other so he can ascend to power.

And that mastermind could only be Ben. As Miles — who evidently escaped Locke’s grenade-in-the-mouth gambit unscathed — said to his captors last night, ”[Ben] wants to survive. And considering a week ago you had a gun to his head and now he’s eating pound cake, I’d say he’s a guy who gets what he wants.” Indeed, only Ben could connive to send Michael onto the freighter and make him think he’s a suicide bomber, and then make the bomb’s mechanism pop up a flag that read ”NOT YET.” (Note that ”yet”: Those explosives looked quite real, and one of the rules of storytelling is bombs are meant to go boom.) Only Ben could argue that he doesn’t kill innocent people in war and somehow make you believe it. Only Ben could devastate Michael by coolly pointing out that the Others never asked him to kill Ana Lucia and Libby; he did that all by himself. And only Ben could have the chutzpah to follow that up by telling Michael he’s now one of ”the good guys.”

I especially liked how, when Michael broke down sobbing after Ben spoke those chilling words, we finally cut from the flashback into a close-up of Sayid, the last man to lose it in the face of his collusion with the talented Mr. Linus. Of course, that’s in the future; the Sayid of the present believes working with Ben is tantamount to selling your soul, and so he had no compunction about selling out Michael to Captain Gault. It was a solid cliff-hanger-y moment, but it left me wondering about two things: One, we’ve heard precious little from Desmond since ”The Constant”; all he seems to do is follow Sayid around and look perplexed. And two, as my other Lost-obsessed colleague Dan Snierson first suggested to me, I think the captain already knows Kevin Johnson is really Michael Dawson. Forget Miles’ psychic intuition that Kevin wasn’t really Kevin. If Charles Widmore is really as ruthlessly capable as we’ve been told, don’t you think he would’ve vetted Kevin Johnson as thoroughly as he did Miles, Lapidus, Faraday, and Charlotte?

Finally, if you’re thinking that I’ve avoided discussing the two characters who, as ABC breathlessly promised, went the way of Nikki and Paulo, you’re right. But if I must, it was, in my humble opinion, lame. Doc Jensen correctly predicted that Karl was going to bite it, which the dude telegraphed pretty quickly by pulling out that hoary Star Wars line ”I have a bad feeling about this.” And while the writers tried to make grafting the Rousseau-Alex-Karl-Ben quadrangle onto Michael’s episode make thematic sense by throwing in a last-minute long-separated-mother-daughter meaningful moment, that still didn’t compensate for unceremoniously offing Danielle Rousseau, Lost’s coolest semi-regular character. Yeah, her arc was pretty much over once she reunited with her daughter, but she could’ve at least gone down in more of a blaze of glory. I guess I’m most bothered by the idea that a woman this wily would’ve just so freely walked into what was obviously yet another Benjamin Linus ambush. He just happened to be carrying around an exquisitely drafted map of the Others’ sanctuary? One that could only house official Others — well, except for Rousseau? Riiiiiight.

And with Alex screaming into the jungle that she was Ben Linus’ daughter, our eight-episode mini Lost marathon draws to a close. The next episode won’t air until April 24 at 10 p.m., so we’ve got plenty of time to chew over Lost issues big and small. For example: Is there something buried deep in Mama Cass’ biography that causes the producers to keep using her music as an emotional cue on the show, or do Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof just, you know, really like jamming out to ”It’s Getting Better”? Do you think the reason we only saw Walt from the waist up last night is because they don’t want us to see how tall this ”10-year-old” has gotten? What was that game show playing during Michael’s thwarted attempts to shoot himself in the head? And, finally, if Mr. Friendly is fine with telling Arturo that Michael smashed him over the head with a champagne bottle, what other sweet somethings has our out-and-proud Other whispered into his lover’s ear?

Your thoughts, Milton?

– by Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly

Patricia Eales will take a petition of 8,000 names to a GO Transit board meeting next week. She wants partial refunds when trains are 20 minutes late.

Oakville rider who began online petition criticizing rail service has become a powerful voice for change

They’re late for work and late coming home to pick up the kids from daycare.

Now GO riders are going to be charged more for what many are calling “atrocious” and “abysmal” service, says an Oakville woman who has become the voice of frustrated commuters across the region.

Pat Eales will take an 8,000-name online petition to the March 14 meeting of the GO board of directors. She plans to ask the board to postpone the fare increase planned for March 15 until GO can run its trains on time.

“Most of the people I rode the trains with, we felt our complaints were being dropped into a bottomless bucket. Now at least people think there’s a collective voice,” said Eales yesterday.

The petition asks GO to refund 50 per cent of fares when trains are late by 20 minutes or more, and to provide better notification of delays.

“We don’t mind paying a good fare for a good service. Just give us good service,” she said.

Eales started the petition Feb. 11, after train delays made her late arriving to work five days in a row, at a job she’d only started in November.

A busy single mother, Eales says an earlier train would put her at the office more than an hour ahead of her start time, but she wouldn’t be able to leave early.

Driving doesn’t make sense because by the time she learns of delays, she’s usually on the train platform, having paid her fare.

“There are obviously people who agree with her,” said GO spokesperson Stephanie Sorensen. “GO and the board are taking her concerns very seriously.”

The transit agency reported that 83 per cent of its trains ran on time last year, down from about 90 per cent in 2006.

Although it’s adding 27 faster locomotives that can pull an extra two cars, that won’t have an impact until later this year, after crews are trained and platforms lengthened throughout the system.

The only new locomotive running so far is temporarily assigned to the Lakeshore line.

Twelve-car trains that can accommodate an additional 300 people each won’t be in service until the summer and will be brought onto the Milton line first, Sorensen said.

Eales’s petition has helped “because now people are paying attention to the situation,” said Oakville MPP Kevin Flynn, who has persuaded Queen’s Park to appoint a customer service expert to a vacancy on the GO board.

“We need somebody who knows how to deal with people. We need somebody at the decision-making level looking at this through a customer service lens,” he said.

“You can’t have an economy the size of Toronto’s and not have a good train system. It doesn’t make any sense.

“If you look at any other jurisdiction around the world, it’s just not optional,” said Flynn.

– By Tess Kalinowski, Transportation Reporter for the Toronto Star

UPDATE: GO SAYS NO 11,000 TIMES

Board refuses to grant fare rebates for delayed trains despite petition from dissatisfied riders

They listened, but Pat Eales isn’t convinced GO Transit’s board of directors heard the deafening hue and cry of frustrated commuters demanding better service and a refund when trains are late.

“They just kept bringing up the same old excuses – the weather, the switches – and that it wasn’t their fault,” the Oakville mother of two said after tabling copies of an online petition at yesterday’s board meeting, supported by almost 11,000 dissatisfied riders.

The petition called for a 50 per cent refund on fares when trains are delayed 20 minutes or more. Eales also asked the board to freeze fare hikes until trains run as scheduled.

But her requests fell on deaf ears. A 15-cent-per-ride fare increase on a single adult ticket goes into effect today. Board chair Peter Smith confirmed there will be no refunds, something he said would spell disaster for the system in the throes of a major expansion.

GO Transit relies on the fare box for operating funds, so essentially riders themselves would be picking up the cost of the refunds.

Eales, however, did walk away with assurances that an advisory board will be established to handle service and reliability issues.

Smith later invited Eales to join that committee. She hasn’t yet decided if she will.

A plan for an improved communication system to advise riders of cancellations and delays was also approved.

During her presentation, Eales called on the board to fix glitches, even those that are out of its control. Tracks, switches and crews are under the jurisdiction of CN and CP, which own the rails GO uses.

“Stop thanking us for our patience and apologizing for any inconvenience you may have caused us. `Sorry’ doesn’t help when we are late for work or late home at night.”

Eales, a single mother of two teens who lives in Bronte, told the Star her patience with the transit system ran out in February after GO problems made her late five days in a row for her new job as an executive assistant at a not-for-profit academic research centre. She had tried emailing GO Transit authorities to complain about the system but got the run-around. She filled out a ridership survey but no one contacted her.

Unless the system becomes more reliable, she warned the board, transit users will get back into their cars.

Eales urged riders to take advantage of the “silent rebate” available at the customer service kiosk at Union Station. Staff offer vouchers when riders complain about late or cancelled trains.

With ridership increasing by 10,000 a day over last year, “we’re the victims of our own success,” Smith said in response, noting that improvements are on the horizon to ease the crunch.

About 170,000 people ride the trains on a typical weekday. “We don’t have the capacity on our trains or lines,” he said. “We’re building that capacity, but it takes a long time.”

Frances Chung, GO’s director of financial services, reported on major work underway to improve the aging signal and switching system. A 33-kilometre third track is being built on the Lakeshore corridor from Hamilton to Oshawa to increase capacity and reduce delays. New locomotives capable of pulling 12 cars are coming on board, as are new bi-level coaches. Crew staffing is also being increased.

Eales’ petition is to go to the Ontario Legislature next week.

– by Leslie Ferenc of the Toronto Star

The Jin Game: Sun may only be pretending that her husband is dead

In an episode with both a flash-forward and a surprise flashback, Sun and Jin deal with her infidelity and the Island’s pregnancy curse

They never made it to Albuquerque in the flash-forward future (at least, not yet), but Jin and Sun landed somewhere deeper in last night’s moving, deviously tricky installment of Lost. Back on point after last week’s subpar Juliet-centric episode, ”Ji-Yeon” had me dabbing my eyes repeatedly. You’re always going to get me watery with a story about the sometimes perilous road of bringing new life into the world; it’s a personal thing, and Lost tapped it well enough, so there you go: I’m sold.

Even better, I loved how this story, unexpectedly, dealt with resolving Sun’s sin against her husband — her infidelity with Jae — yet also completed Jin’s redemptive reconstruction into a husband worthy of his wife’s faithfulness. I’m not sure if Jin really is destined for death, as the final moments of the show seemed to suggest, but in many ways the episode felt like a valedictory for the character. Recognizing his own moral failure during his fishing-boat heart-to-heart with Bernard (a kinda corny but altogether effective scene), the former underworld strongman was able to forgive his Sun and recognize his role in pushing her away. But the beautiful moment came when he said he would follow her to Locke’s camp — this, from the man who just a couple months ago in Lost time demanded his wife obediently trot after him. The role reversal closed the circuit on Jin’s redemptive arc and had me searching for tissues anew. When he asked, with great vulnerability, if the baby was his, and Sun assured him that it was, I grabbed more. Well played by Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim, this was Jin and Sun’s finest hour since season 1.

But we’re going to rumble over that flashback fake-out, aren’t we?

”Ji-Yeon” seemed to contain a shared flash-forward that seemed to reveal that both Jin and Sun had made it off the Island. More, it appeared to tell the story of the birth of their child, a daughter named Ji-Yeon (which means either ”delay” or ”flower of wisdom”), and how Jin missed the blessed event because of a comic episode involving his frustrated quest to buy a giant stuffed panda. But then the show pulled the rug on us. Hard. Lost had given us an episode with both a flashback (that panda business was part of an errand Jin was running for his mobster boss, Sun’s father, Mr. Paik) and a flash-forward (we learned that Sun, a member of the Oceanic 6, got off the Island in time to successfully duck its anti-pregnant-lady curse and give birth). But I dig narrative gamesmanship, especially when it’s supported by a strong, compelling character idea. Jin’s flashback served as a touchstone that reminded him (or just us) of the morally flimsy man he used to be. He needed to feel that anew — and we needed to see that again — in order for him to be able to (very quickly) reach reconciliation with his wife in the Island present. Iit worked for me.

Also, debate this: Do you think Jin’s really dead in the flash-forward future?

In the last scene, we saw Hurley travel to Seoul and join Sun in visiting Jin’s grave and introducing Ji-Yeon to her father, at least in spirit. But the marker indicated the date of death as 9/22/2004 — the day Oceanic 815 crashed. As the episode reminded us, wreckage of Oceanic 815 was found in the ocean, along with corpses of all the passengers. Some possibilities:

1. The marker was erected when Jin and all the other passengers were declared dead. But Jin really isn’t dead. He’s on the Island, or somewhere, for some reason. Hurley and Sun — who clearly have secrets to keep regarding the fate of their friends — merely went to Jin’s grave site for the sake of keeping up appearances. After all, they’re super-celebs in the future, their movements and choices are being tracked by the press — and, possibly, their enemies.

2. Nope: Jin’s dead. He’s gonna bite it in the unfolding Island story. So while the marker bears the wrong date, it’s all the same to Sun: Her husband is gone.

Thoughts?

Oh, and I can’t finish my Jin-Sun riffing without noting how my jaw dropped when Juliet spilled the beans about Sun’s affair to Jin in order to prevent them from skipping off to Locke’s camp. The balls on Juliet! That was ice cold. Awesome!

Other thoughts:

The Love Boat, this is not
Not that he needs the money, but Charles Widmore should rent the Freighter out for Halloween parties, because man, is this boat one freaky place! We got roaches, suicidal crew members, and blood splatter on the walls. (I loved the deadpan doctor’s line: ”That shouldn’t be there.”) And we got a heartless Aussie captain named Gault who likes to tell spooky stories about people who should be dead and yet are very much alive. Finally deciding to grant Desmond and Sayid an audience, the gruff Gault brought out the black box of Oceanic 815, purchased, he explained, at great cost and through secret channels by his boss, Widmore. (The mention of his name caused Desmond’s peepers to pop out of his sockets in surprise.) Gault told the castaways that the world thinks all 324 passengers were found at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Clearly, this was staged — but how? ”Where exactly does one come across 324 bodies?” Gault asked. Then he put this conspiracy right at the feet of the man he and his freighter thugs had come to nab: Benjamin Linus. Our freighter questions mount: Why does Widmore have his ascot in a bunch over Ben? And what was that secret midnight mission Lapidus, a self-proclaimed castaway ally, went on?

Three small things about the freighter before we get to the big fourth thing:

Is there any special significance to Captain Gault’s name? Glad you asked! Just so happens that there’s a John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, written by Lost-cited author Ayn Rand. In Shrugged, Galt is a mystery man who has invented a powerful new source of energy and has vanished off the face of the earth. Turns out he and some other ”captains of industry” (Wikipedia’s phrasing) have formed a secret society in Colorado. I’m not a Rand guy; never read the book. I’m certain that connections could be made here to Dharma and the Others, Ben and Widmore. Feel free to comment on your dissertation on the book’s significance to Lost…

Late addition: I just woke up from a nap after submitting this recap to my editor and received an e-mail from reader Tom, who points out that Captain Gault is also the name of a maritime adventure hero created by writer William Hope Hodgson. According to Wikipedia, Captain Gault is a ”captain for hire” who is ”highly placed in a secret society….In general, he reveals himself to have surprising reservoirs of specialized knowledge. Where he got all this knowledge is generally not revealed; we get only these tantalizing hints at the character’s past.” Says Tom, ”This last sentence seems to sum up all of Lost, doesn’t it?” Nice catch, dude! And this gives me a chance to make a connection I’ve always wanted to make: Hodgson also wrote stories about a spectral investigator named Carnacki (think: Miles Straum?), who lived at 472 Cheyne Walk, in London — just down the street from where Penelope Widmore lives!

What was the book that the troubled Regina was ”reading” upside down? It was Survivors of the Chancellor, by Jules Verne, an 1875 novel of psychological suspense about — get this — the castaways of a grounded ship who start killing themselves from madness and despair. Interestingly enough, the books that Verne published before and after Survivors of the Chancellor have some powerful Lost resonances: Mysterious Island (also 1875) is, of course, considered an essential text, but then there’s Michael Strogoff (1876), about a spy on a mission named…Michael. His lady love? A woman who shares the name of Sayid’s Iraqi sweetheart, Nadia.

Why did Regina kill herself? Because she was inconsolable over the death of her lover — the late, Locke-knifed Brit Naomi. Remember the inscription on her bracelet? ”N, I’ll always be with you, R.G.” Yep: I’m thinking Regina is ”R.G.”

And now, for that big fourth thing:

Hey — don’t I know you from someplace? Oh, yeah! You’re the guy who sold out my friends and killed those two Tailie girls just to get your weirdo psychic son back! I loved this scene. Doc Freighter was showing Sayid and Desmond to their bug-infested quarters when he summoned freighter janitor Kevin Johnson to scrub that brain paint off the wall. (Shades of Radzinsky, Kelvin’s former partner in the Hatch and originator of the blast-door map, who blew his brains out and left some stain on the Swan’s ceiling.) Pushing his mop bucket down the hall, K.J. emerged from the shadows and revealed himself to be Michael, looking both meeker and buffer than we last saw him at the end of season 2, sailing away from the Island with Walt. He and Sayid shared a tense moment (Pleasepleaseplease don’t bust me!) — and that was that for this episode. The promos for next week’s episode promise a major download of Michael intel.

Two things:

1. Despite my theories explaining Michael’s return, I’ve become quite taken by the suggestion offered by others that actor Harold Perrineau isn’t playing Michael but rather a grown-up version of Walt. I gotta tell you I really dig that idea.

2. I know many of you felt that Michael’s return was anticlimactic, the surprise spoiled by ABC’s promos and Perrineau’s presence in the credits in recent weeks. In an ironic turn of events, my coverage of those complaints wound up functioning as a spoiler for those of you who weren’t aware of Perrineau’s return. My apologies for my role in ruining the surprise; I should have been more careful.

The Oceanic 6 is set. Right? Right?
Sun’s flash-forward fake-out seemed to close out the first act of Lost’s future-time story line: identifying the members of the Oceanic 6, the celebrity miracle survivors of Oceanic 815. To recap, they are Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Aaron, and Sun. Now, I know what some of you are saying: Aaron can’t be a member of the Oceanic 6 because he wasn’t born prior to the crash and therefore was not technically an Oceanic 815 passenger. To which I say, Please. Don’t be so literal. In the Lost world, the Oceanic 6 is clearly a media-coined term, pinned on these six souls by some clever headline writer or newscaster. And being in the business, I can tell you that tiny little facts like Aaron’s non-passenger status would never, ever get in the way of a easy, catchy piece of phrasing. We journalists are exactly that lazy. So let’s call it: The Oceanic 6 is settled. Now, let’s move on to the next act of their story, which I’m betting will cover two big points: the backstory behind Jack’s downward spiral into boozy, grizzly-bearded, we-gotta-go-back-to-the-Island mania, and more context for Ben and Sayid’s secret war with their list of mysterious off-Island foes.

I now turn the space over to you. What did you think of ”Ji-Yeon”? Did you like it as much as I did? Gimme your Michael and Jin theories, Milton Lost nation! Go!

– by Jeff Jenson of Entertainment Weekly

Highway crews can’t keep up with intense freeze-thaw cycle

The 400 series of Ontario highways looks more like a series of bumps and road holes these days, but the transportation ministry blames the weather and says crews are working as hard as they can.

“We’ve had some very severe freeze-thaw cycles this year,” said ministry spokesperson Will MacKenzie.

Rather than set a specific budget for pothole patching, the ministry folds that expense into the long-term contracts signed with companies responsible for general maintenance of the highways in their areas.

MacKenzie said one series of storms was so intense this winter, that crews hadn’t yet finished clearing one snowfall when the one next hit, leaving no time for pothole repairs.

Even so, the contractors are patrolling the highways round the clock, every day of the week, on the lookout for heaved asphalt, road debris and other problems, MacKenzie said.

He said one 401 stretch is in especially bad shape – the eastbound lanes just west of Milton, from Kelso Lake to Guelph Line.

“We’re trying to get out there to grind off the top layer of pavement” to replace the pitted surface, he said.

“The pavement in that particular location is about 14 years old.”

But there’s an epidemic of road craters all through southern Ontario “because of the severe freeze-thaw cycles we’ve been going through,” he said.

“They’re getting out to them as quickly as they can.”

OPP Sgt. Cam Woolley said that he has also noticed the severe rash of potholes on important highways, but he chalks it up to a difficult winter.

He said he hasn’t heard of a bad accident that was caused by a pothole but “I remember one so bad it knocked the hubcaps off one of the police cars.”

In such extreme cases, the ministry crews are “pretty vigilant about making repairs quickly,” he said.

Motorists can file a complaint about a nasty pothole or general road conditions by calling 1-800-268-4686.

– By Joanna Smith of the Toronto Star

After Juliet turned Ben down, he arranged for her lover’s death

Juliet flashes back to when she was the object of the head Other’s unrequited love, but then she obeys his orders to stop the freighter folks’ mission

This is the time in the ”Lost” season when we begin to feel the first tingle of antsy-pants impatience — where a simmering feeling blossoms into full awareness that nothing has really happened since the exciting, season-launching events of the premiere. Consider last year. As we entered the sixth episode, the Jack-Kate-Sawyer Hydra story line had advanced by baby steps, while back on the beach, Smokey had just bashed Mr. Eko to death. Not exactly a fruitful yield on a five-hour investment. For certain, this fourth season of Lost has been more interesting (thank you, flash-forwards) and focused (thank you, freighter folk and plot-driving end date), but let’s be honest: Since the introduction of the freighter folk in episode 2, the Island-set drama has been stuck in neutral. And so, at the risk of sounding downright ungrateful following last week’s instant-classic Desmond outing, I approached ”The Other Woman,” last night’s Juliet-centric affair, itchy for some action. After three weeks of set-ups, I wanted an episode with at least a few payoffs.

Well, be careful what you privately wish for. The best thing I can say about ”The Other Woman” is that it tried hard to deliver the goods I wanted — maybe too hard. The whole thing felt forced to me — the sudden transformation of Charlotte and Faraday into Mission: Impossible secret agents; the overheated melodrama of Juliet’s flashback; the groaningly contrived kiss between Jack and Juliet (Juliack?); the cliché ticking-clock climax in which catastrophe is averted with a proverbial second to spare. The story was kinda all over the place, as if trying to find something, anything to hook us — and fortunately, it managed to nab me with its Ben and Locke scenes (always killer, in my opinion) and the über-Other’s mythology-expanding claim that the Big Bad behind the freighter (and maybe all of Lost) is none other than Penelope’s father, Charles Widmore. It was almost enough to salvage the first truly subpar episode of the season. Some thoughts:

Stormy weather
”The Other Woman” began with the Jack pack discovering that Charlotte and Faraday had disappeared into the jungle on an unusually rain-soaked night. According to the clues Lost has given us, this episode would seem to coincide with the tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, an event that would only be relevant to Lost if you believe (as some do) that the Island is located in the Indian Ocean, not the South Pacific. So the severe rain shower that pounded the Island during the opening scenes could be a wink at the tsunami — or at least, tsunami theorists. But did the episode offer another coy allusion to that natural disaster? I refer to:

A Tempest by any other name (part 1)
”The Other Woman” gave us a new Dharma facility, a power plant known as the Tempest. Much can be said about the name assigned to this station — The Tempest is, of course, a famous play by William Shakespeare and that Lost seems to have much in common with that masterwork: It is a comment on the Renaissance pastoral genre, in which the natural environment is often characterized as a restorative, magical force. In the play, the troubled royals are washed up on a strange island and find that they must grapple with the social and political problems of their normal lives, but within a strange new context of magic and disorientation. Sound familiar? Sure does! Keith thinks of Ben as Prospero, ”the magician at the center of the island’s seductive madness,” though he declines to say who’s the equivalent of Prospero’s imprisoned fairy, Ariel. Maybe he thought making a connection to Juliet was too obvious.

A Tempest by any other name (part 2)
Of course, there are some of you who, when they hear The Tempest, don’t think ”Shakespeare!” but instead ”Robby the Robot!” I refer to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, loosely based on ”The Tempest” and long-suspected of being a secret Lost text. In Forbidden Planet, astronauts from our time happen on a planet where a wise scientist and his daughter have harnessed the energy of the planet and are living in relative comfort. But it turns out that in harnessing the planet’s energy, the scientist’s ‘id’ becomes expressed through a strange monster. In Lost, we have an island with strange powers, harnessed somehow through the Hatch, but with violence erupting through the black smoke. I leave it to you, my friends, to excavate further meaning out of the film. I have an episode to recap.

Omniscient Ben strikes again!
The plot kicked in when Juliet encountered an old foil in the jungle: Harper, the Others’ psychotherapist (”it’s very stressful being an Other,” Juliet later explained to Jack) and wife to Juliet’s old Other lover, Goodwin. Harper — whose entrance and exit was accompanied by a choir of creepy jungle whispers (long time, no talk!) — had an urgent message from Ben. He wanted Juliet to track down and kill Faraday and Charlotte before they completed their mission of unleashing the deadly chemicals housed inside the Tempest. By episode’s end, we learned Charlotte and Faraday were actually conspiring to do the exact opposite: Their mission all along was to neutralize the chemical stockpile in order to prevent Ben from pulling another Purge. Ben’s mobilization of Harper raises many questions, not the least of which is ”Where are the rest of the Others hiding?” It also suggests that either Ben can telepathically communicate with his people, or the surviving Others are executing orders Ben gave them prior to the events of last year’s season finale, orders undoubtedly based on insight supplied by his freighter spy. As Ben told Locke, ”I always have a plan.”

A Good(win) man is hard to find
I was really looking forward to this flashback. The first two peeks into Juliet’s past — ”Not in Portland” and ”One of Us” — were all-time keepers, in my book, and I thought they still left plenty to be explored, particularly the reluctant Other’s romantic relationship with Goodwin and her turbulent rapport with Ben. But I was a little let down by what we got. I wasn’t fond of the performance by Andrea Roth as Harper, nor was I fond of the lines written for her; she came off as too arch and unreal. I didn’t like the revelation that the Juliet-Goodwin romance was an adulterous affair; it was a needless, underdeveloped twist that rendered Goodwin murky instead of complicated. And it ultimately didn’t tell me anything about Juliet that previous flashbacks — and Elizabeth Mitchell’s layered performance — didn’t already establish or suggest. That said, I totally dug Ben’s creepy loverboy act, culminating with the revelation that he had Goodwin infiltrate the Tailies in the hope that he’d get killed and thus be eliminated as a rival for Juliet’s affections. I loved the part where Ben took Juliet to Goodwin’s corpse, told her ”You’re mine!” then graciously allowed her to grieve by saying, with apparent sincerity, ”Take as much time as you need.” If I haven’t said so before, Michael Emerson is just genius in this role.

See? They haven’t forgotten the kids!
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing reference to abducted Tailie kids Zack and Emma during the scene in which Juliet and Ben ”enjoyed” a ”romantic” ham dinner together. Ben commended Juliet on her care for the kids. But it was the disclosure that they were kidnapped strictly because they were ”on the list” that struck me. I used to have a theory that the Others swiped kids either because of their fertility problem or because kids tend to develop a magical, powerful rapport with the Island that isn’t easily controllable (see: Walt) and the Others know that and try to manage that lest it become a problem. But if we are to believe Ben, it was merely a matter of faith — faith in Jacob’s will, as revealed by the holy writ of the list.

Penelope’s dad: Devil or scapegoat?
Ben continued to get under Locke’s skin by needling him anew about his shaky leadership, which this week got tested in the unlikely form of Claire, who asked if she could have a go at interrogating MIA Miles. (Is he still gumming that grenade or what? I want to know already!) The Claire moment was another example of this episode’s forcing things; the scene seemed to have been written just to give the actress something to do. (And I know this is an overdue, off-topic complaint, but I have to clear my conscience and say this: In retrospect, I think the show owed Claire one or two Charlie-grieving scenes. Anyway, I digress.) Locke got challenged once again, and Ben tried to work it once again, saying, ”Have they started the revolution yet?” (How does this man know so much about what Locke is going through? Intuition? Psychic powers? Or just previous experience of being a disliked leader of faithless, impatient people?) But Locke managed to turn the tables on Ben by revealing he knew about the deal Miles presented him. This prompted Ben to play his supposed trump card: his claim (supported with surveillance videotape and dossiers) that they are united by a common enemy, alleged freighter master Widmore, who Ben says is desperate to find the Island so he can ruthlessly exploit it. Here’s my question for you: Do you believe this? (I do.) And are you with me that Michael is going to be revealed as Ben’s spy, or do you think we’re being set up for a twist there? (Personally, I’m not completely sure.)

The (ugh) kiss
I liked everything that led up to it. I liked how Juliet pulled this frustrating episode together with her final speech to Jack. In the end, this was really a story about Ben and the lengths he will go to protect himself and the Island from his enemies. And the bad news for Juliet is that those extreme lengths might include manipulating her any way Ben sees fit, even leveraging her feelings for Jack, because after all, in Ben’s mind, she belongs to him. If only Juliet had walked away after this speech, everything would have been okay. But no: Jack had to kiss her. Part of me can believe it: Juliet represents exactly the kind of Girl That Needs Rescuing that totally gets Doc Messiah hot — and ultimately leaves him burned. Look, I can buy the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle; this dynamic makes sense to me. But adding a fourth party — even in the form of Juliet, a character I like very much — just doesn’t work for me. I just don’t think Jack would complicate his life with that kind of thing — not right now. It also seems to me that the last thing Juliet needs is more man trouble. Hasn’t she learned anything from her backstory? Doesn’t she know it never ends well for ”the other woman”?

It’s time I turned this space over to you. Am I being too hard on the episode? What have I missed? And what are your Widmore theories, Milton?

– by Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly

The global movement to step out of the artificial light and into complete darkness – to draw attention to climate change – is snowballing across the country.

Since the launch of the Toronto Star’s countdown to Earth Hour, cities across the country have been signing up. Montreal has announced its intention to join up and Sarnia, Ontario has also been welcomed to the campaign.

“I’ve been a great believer that governments are too slow on moving on these issues,” said Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley. “Here is a way of getting a lot of people involved at no cost.”

Participation is as simple as turning off your lights – between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on March 29.

Bradley pointed out that Earth Hour is not all about sacrifice. “I also think it’s going to have a very positive impact on national unity because Canadians from coast to coast can all shut off Don Cherry all at the same time.”

Among those Canadians are the residents of Halton Region and Mississauga who also officially committed to the project this week.

Mississauga Councillor George Carlson said since the campaign was announced Mayor Hazel McCallion and the 11 councillors were 100 per cent on board.

“In fact some of them wanted to jump in with both feet and do things like turning out the street lights and shutting down recreation centres,” he said.

Their plan is to work with local environmental groups to get the message out and shut down as many lights as possible, including many at City Hall, he said.

“We unanimously supported it, which is a nice change for council.”

Sarnia, as Bradley points out, already has several green initiatives on the go. It has the largest solar farm in North America and one of the largest biofuel plants in the country, he said.

Bradley said if people were really realistic about problems with power shortages and air quality, “I could see an hour every day.”

– by Emily Mathieu of the Toronto Star

After last week’s time-tripping Desmond episode, it’s probably good we spend some more time with it, given the intensity of passion and interest that many fans continue to have in the episode, arguably the best single outing since season 1’s ”Walkabout.” And to help us understand the story’s noodle-cooking intricacies, I have some crucial insight from exec producer and ”Constant” co-writer Damon Lindelof that I think you’ll wanna know. To wit:

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO DESMOND?
In ”The Constant,” Desmond became ”unstuck in time” after flying through a thundercloud crackling with strange electricity. He experienced something like time travel, though not bodily time travel; instead, his consciousness shuttled between two different time periods, Island present 2004 and Desmond’s past 1996. But here’s the tricky twist: Desmond’s Island-present mind wasn’t the one doing the time traveling. When Desmond got hit with Island magic, his consciousness got knocked off-line and was replaced by his 1996 self. It was this older Desmond consciousness that toggled between present and past throughout the episode. Once Desmond ‘96 completed the errand of getting Penny’s phone number so he could call her on Christmas Eve 2004, Desmond’s present-day mind came back online, but rebooted with the new memories created by his time-travel adventure. I know: tricky stuff. But I had the chance to run all this by Damon Lindelof — and he says this interpretation is correct.

THE MINKOWSKI EXCEPTION
Desmond had the time-warp blues, but freighter freak Minkowski had Marty McFly Mania: Due to his own exposure to electromagnetic magic, he began psychically commuting back to a pleasant day on a Ferris wheel. He died desperately trying to zip-line back to this happy day one more time. Coldly poignant, I thought. Notice: Unlike Desmond’s time-travel story, Minkowski’s present day consciousness was making the trip. Lindelof says this difference was designed to make a very important point: ”As Faraday explains in the episode, the effect is random. Sometimes a person can be displaced by minutes, other times, years. And the direction of the effect is equally unpredictable. Our way of demonstrating this was to give Minkowski a wildly different experience than Desmond was having.” Lindelof says none of this is arbitrary; exposure to electromagnetism or radiation plays a role. But he adds: ”Looking for specific rules for how all this works will lead you down the path of insanity.”

PARADOX R/X, or ”HOW COURSE CORRECTION WORKS”
To be clear, Desmond’s past was different before ”The Constant.” Before his time-travel adventure, Desmond never met Faraday at Oxford, never got Penelope’s digits. As a consequence of changing the past, Desmond’s personal history has been ”course corrected” by The Powers That Be, beginning from the moment he walked away from Penny’s apartment. Lindelof says this interpretation is also correct. But here’s a Big Question: since scoring Penelope’s phone number, has Course-Corrected Desmond lived his life knowing that on Christmas Eve 2004, he MUST be on a freighter in the South Pacific in order to make a call to Penelope if he wants any chance of having a future with her? Lindelof says this is indeed a matter we should be mulling. Perhaps in the future, Lost will give us an episode that replays Desmond’s backstory (getting the boat from Libby; killing Kelvin; meeting the castaways) from the point of view of this knowingness.

THE LIPS OF TURBULENCE
Desmond’s ”unstuck in time” nightmare began when Frank flew the helicopter into that monstrous thundercloud. The chopper was buffeted by intense turbulence. Lightning flashed. Frank pulled up and out of trouble. So what was that weird weather all about? Well, I don’t think it was a passing storm. In, fact, I really don’t think you can call it weather. As I explained last week, I think the Island is located inside the mouth of a wormhole, a possibly volatile anomaly in the time-space fabric. The chopper was passing over the rough-and-tumble boundary that exists between the anomaly and the outside world. (That wormhole has seriously blistered lips.) Another way of thinking about this is to think of a curtain hanging around the Island at a certain point offshore. This curtain extends from the sky to the ocean floor — hence, why The Sub also encounters turbulence when traveling to and from the Island. (See: Juliet’s backstory in ”One of Them.”)

The problem with wormhole theory is that wormholes don’t stay open on their own. Theoretically, they require a constant (and literally astronomical) supply of energy to stay in business. This past week, popularmechanics.com (which frequently ruminates on the science of Lost) speculated that this could have been why The Button had to be pushed every 108 minutes — to harness and discharge wormhole-sustaining electromagnetic energy.

Of course, now that the Hatch is gone, does that mean the wormhole is closed? Here’s my theory: I think the failsafe key protocol (initiated by Desmond in the season 2 finale) called for one last blast of energy designed to keep the wormhole open for an extended period of time so that final business could be conducted. But when that time elapses, it’s hasta la vista time-space anomaly. And maybe, bye-bye Island, too.

TIME PASSAGES
The chopper left the Island at dusk, but didn’t arrive at the freighter until afternoon the next day, even though the flight lasted about 30 minutes. This bit of weirdness inspired the following question in my mind: Do different trajectories away from the Island lead to different points in time? Lapidus flew a trajectory (A) that took just 30 minutes; the chopper landed about 18 hours later. If Lapidus had flown a slightly different trajectory (B) that took roughly the same time, perhaps he might have arrived sooner. Or even later. Or possibly never. Why might this be important to season 4? Because if I’m right — if every different route away from the Island leads to a different point in time — then you have to wonder about those coordinates Ben gave Michael and Walt at the end of season 2. The question isn’t just ”Where did Ben send them?” — it could also be ”When?”

TIME DIFFERENTIAL: BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD?
For a couple weeks now, we’ve been trying to figure out the significance of Daniel Faraday’s rocket experiment, which seemed to establish a 31-minute time differential between the Island and the freighter. However, ”The Constant” suggested (at least to me) another possibility: it could be that the Island and the freighter are in synch, and that the rocket gained the extra time while flying through the turbulent perimeter of the anomaly. This is all to say, I think we need to reconsider the idea that ”time passes more slowly on the Island” until we get more data.

MINKOWSKI GOT ”THE SICKNESS”
It seems most likely that the time-travel illness that killed Minkowski is the same mythical ‘’sickness” that killed The French Lady’s fellow scientists wayyy back in the day. I really love this idea. I was never fond of the idea that ”the sickness” was a Dharma hoax. It just didn’t feel right. But this — this feels right. And if it is right, I love it even more for the way this answer was basically left for us to puzzle out, as opposed to having some dude explain it all to us. I expect that in the coming episodes and seasons, more Lost mysteries will be resolved this way.

Ok Milton, what do you think?

- By Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

A couple of days ago, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released his third budget. This is something unheard of for a minority government being able to have this many budgets without being defeated. In many cases, they’re doing a good job and while most Canadians don’t want an election, they seem comfortable with our MP’s in this minority situation.

Here are a couple of items that I pulled from the budget. All in all, it is a pretty sound plan for the coming years. Some of the big highlights for towns and cities are as follows:

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.