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THE WAR ON PARVATI: She won despite taking the most hits at the final tribal council

Poor Amanda. She spent 39 days suffering in China, went home for a few months, and then spent 39 more days getting rained on in Palau. She made it to the very end twice — the only Survivor contestant ever to do so. She won the final challenges of each season and got to hand-pick her finale opponents. And what does she have to show for it besides two crappy-ass final tribal council performances? Now, make no mistake about it, Amanda wasn’t as insanely awful this time as she was in China, when she basically handed Todd a million dollars on a silver platter, but she wasn’t very good either. Her low point came when Cirie asked her why Parvati deserved to be there over her, leading the doe-eyed dummy to give a speech on what a ”powerhouse” Parvati was and how she made so many bold decisions, in essence telling the jury to vote for the person sitting next to her.

Here’s the thing: Amanda was no slouch in this game. She was smart enough to ask to be sent to Exile Island so she could go find the hidden immunity idol, and then sold it to her tribemates that she didn’t have it. She won challenges. She was completely left out of the loop on a major decision (to get rid of Ozzy) yet still managed to reinsert herself back into a position of power. But then she got back to the final tribal council and just refused to own it. And thus the game became Parvati’s.

I don’t have a problem with that. Love her or loathe her, Parvati played a totally solid game. Probably the second best strategist out there this season after Cirie. But first let’s look at what went down in the season finale leading up to this Shallow victory (no pun intended). The episode began with the women doing a very awkward victory dance and laughing at how stupid men are. Like men that have immunity idols but don’t use them. Or men who win immunity and then give it away. Or men who stay up late at night drinking cheap beer and writing recaps of reality shows for no particular reason. Men like that. Look, I love what the women have done this season. I think it’s awesome. I just don’t need them to hammer their awesomeness down my throat every two minutes. That ‘’stir the pot” dance of theirs is already about as old as the macarena or electric slide.

So what else would they do with no men around? Well, Parvati scaled a tree and cut down a bushel of coconuts. Honestly, had I been there with her, I probably wouldn’t have been much help. Of course, that’s because I would have been busy barfing after getting a close-up view of her big bitten and sore-covered legs. As for Natalie, she revealed that she felt she needed to be more of a bitch in real life. Uhhhhhhh, okay. You do that. A piece of advice, Natalie: The black-widow thing works wonders in Survivor. In real life, it just kinda makes you trashy. Save it for the game, babe.

Natalie actually had a big early lead in the first immunity challenge but then evidently began daydreaming about new, improved ways to be bitchy during the step-puzzle portion and was easily passed by Amanda. And that was it for Natalie at a truly historic tribal council — historic because I believe it was the first ever TC to feature a heart drawn onto every single piece of parchment. (You know, you’d think a group of women who love to brag about what cutthroat black widows they are would come up with a more badass symbol then a heart. How about a skull? Or a knife? Or a picture of Jeff Probst having his head blown off by a shotgun? Basically, anything but a heart.)

Before being voted out, however, Natalie gave us a little sneak peek into her bizarre views on sexuality by insisting that they should allow their chicken to go free and ”let the rooster have his way with her.” Okay, I get it, it’s been over a month on an island. You guys are pretty bored. But watching chickens have sex? Far more entertaining (and far less disturbing) was watching Cirie and Amanda go at it at tribal council, when Cirie pointed out she was on the outside of the Amanda-Parvati alliance. Which she was. They made up back at camp after a group hug. (Again, not very badass; wouldn’t a group slap be more in keeping with their new image?) As dumb as the guys were this season, Parvati, Amanda, and Cirie weren’t much smarter for assuming that it would be a final three as opposed to a final two. Hello, you haven’t had to take part yet in the cheesy, yawn-inducing ”fallen comrades” tribute, which always precedes the final challenge! You can’t sniff the finals until you sniff that thing (in which this time we were treated to such fascinating nuggets as Parvati’s incendiary comment that ”I didn’t really know Mary” — riveting stuff). The only interesting thing about the fallen-comrades montage this time was trying to figure out who sounded more in love with himself, Jason or Natalie. Jason informed us that ”I came out here as a strong competitor and solid provider, and nobody really saw that because I think everybody was just focused on Ozzy.” (Wait, you think everybody else was too focused on Ozzy?) Meanwhile Natalie told us that she is her biggest fan. (By the way, backtracking a bit, I’ve never liked the final-three concept, even if it did get Ozzy into the Cook Islands finals. The inherent drama in a two-person face-off is much greater than having votes scattered among three people. Just wanted to wedge that in awkwardly before we moved on…which we kind of already had. Sorry about that.)

The ladies finally made it to the real final challenge, which involved balancing a silver ball on a cylinder while adding pieces to it. It was very similar in spirit to the final China challenge, which Amanda dominated, so it was no surprise to see her win here as well. While I’m blabbering on about things I don’t like, I’m not a big fan of these balancing challenges either. I’d like them to get back to something involving people standing or hanging in awkward positions for as long as possible. I just like the idea of contestants having to endure something really, really painful to get that million dollars, not just balancing a ball or some teacups. If nothing else, it makes the stakes seem higher.

Back at camp, Parvati inadvertently did her best to persuade Amanda to take Cirie to the finals instead of her by pointing out how Cirie would get no votes. Amanda seemed generally torn as to whom to bring with her, pointing out how Cirie had pissed so many people off but was a good speaker. ”It’s kind of a catch-22,” said Amanda, proving once and for all that she has no idea what a catch-22 is. She got to tribal council, busted out the doe eyes, and looked like she was going to break down. And then she did! As soon as she started weeping, I have no doubt that someone in the production booth began yelling, ”Get me an Eliza eye-roll shot, stat!” And sure enough, there it was. It was the end of Cirie, as well as my chances for once again predicting a Survivor winner from the very beginning. Oh, well, the streak was nice while it lasted. Now I can finally get back to the mediocre predictions you all know, love, and mock incessantly.

So what to make of the final tribal council? Just plan odd. Eliza told Parvati she ”might just be a mean person” yet then (after milking every single second of camera time possible) voted for her, and James told Parvati, ”You fluffed me on several occasions,” which may or may not be the first time Parvati has been mistaken for a fluffer. (This is a family-friendly, PG-13 recap, so if you don’t know what a fluffer is, you’re going to have to Google it yourself, and neither I nor EW.com can be held responsible for some of the sites you may come across in the search.) And then we were back to rooster-sex-watching Natalie, who brought up Parvati’s flirting and asked, ”How does that resonate for you in the bedroom?” Say what? I think Probst’s look of utter confusion pretty much summed it up. Wait, is she hitting on her? I wondered? ”You flirted with me on several occasions.” She is hitting on her! And why does everything Parvati does have to happen ”on several occasions”? I’m not sure if this whole exchange was more or less uncomfortable than Parvati trying to talk gangsta to James. Speaking of uncomfortable, wow, what was Ozzy’s deal? He must have been pounding some Keystone Light at the jury house before tribal because he was sporting some serious bitter beer face with those accusations at Parvati. Dude, she played you. It was a good move. Nothing more. Nothing less. Which, to his credit, Ozzy seemed to realize after he’d calmed down for a few months.

So even with everyone throwing arrows at Parvati, Amanda still couldn’t capitalize — again. I feel sorry for the girl. Maybe it’s just because she hot. Who knows? As for the reunion show, well, I’m still bummed that Probst no longer delivers the votes from the foreign locale via hang glider or some other ridiculous means of transportation. Those have always been the funniest moments of Survivor finales, and I beg the producers to start doing them again. It’s season 16, for crissakes — have some fun with it! Have him and the votes be delivered on the shoulders of giant fire-breathing, break-dancing robots. I don’t care. Just do something! My other initial thought upon seeing the contestants at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City was that Amanda and Parvati must have just come straight from some sort of tacky-earring convention. I was secretly praying for a 4-4 tie just so we could see what the hell the tiebreaker would have been. Were they going to have to make fire right then and there on the stage, and if so, exactly how many New York City fire codes would that have broken?

If you tuned out after Parvati won the million bucks, you didn’t miss much. Fairplay tried to get Probst to hug his infant daughter, Chet gave Probst crap for giving him crap, and Joel kind of looked like crap with his new buzz cut. Ozzy forgave Parvati, James won $100,000 as the viewers’ favorite contestant, and I swear I saw that Baba Booey guy from Howard Stern in the audience.

Okay, guys, it’s late, and I’m out of pistachios. A few notes before I sign off for the season. First off, we will be doing Survivor Talk installments with Parvati, Amanda, Cirie, and Natalie, so look for those on Tuesday. (Our interview with Erik is already up.) Doing Survivor Talk was a blast, and I hope you guys enjoyed watching it as much as we did shooting it every week. While I’m doling out the thanks, thanks again for reading and playing along here on the Survivor TV Watch. You guys have made this one of the liveliest and most entertaining boards on the entire site and…well…I…oh, jeez, I think I’m gonna make like Amanda and start crying if I keep this up. You get the point. Have a great summer, and I’ll see you next fall for Survivor: Gabon. If that season is even half as good as this one was, we’re all in for a treat. And hey, it can’t be any worse than Fiji, right? C ya!

– by Dalton Ross of EW.com

KNIFE GUY FINISHES LAST Little John Locke chose the wrong thing in the test

Last night was for us. The cultists. The obsessives. The crazies who have committed to this long, strange trip and gotten lost in it. Like the candy bar Hurley generously shared with Ben while Locke was chatting with the spectral squatters inside Jacob’s shack (a nod to the Neo-Oracle-cookie scene in The Matrix?), ”Cabin Fever” was an episode packed with a chunky abundance of brain-fattening cryptonuggets to nourish our fevered theory making and message-board blustering. Comic-book references. Biblical allusions. Mythological connections. Double meanings to scores of lines. I loved Hurley’s ”theory” that he, Ben, and Locke were chosen for this vision quest because they were the craziest ones on the Island. This in an episode whose ’50s-set flashbacks evoked, fittingly, AMC’s Mad Men and whose thematic concern with fate mirrors that of No Country for Old Men, a narrative about three men dangling on sanity’s thread, though at different points. Amid the clues, red herrings, and tomfoolery, I saw in the episode a fiendishly clever love letter to those of us who’ve become so locked up inside Lost that they’ve been somewhat deliriously messed up by it. That’s really why they called it ”Cabin Fever.” Just my theory, but who knows? Maybe I’m just seeing things again.

”Can history then be said to have an architecture? The notion is most glorious and most horrible.” — From Hell

Should John Locke be lucky enough to see the year 2008, he would be 50. That would make him as old as the central figure in the aforementioned text, one Sir William Gull, a 19th-century English physician. Some interesting overlaps between these characters. In From Hell, Gull is a middle-aged man uncertain of his purpose, but he is convinced he is special and senses that the architecture of his life is building to a point. Or, in the sweet, hiccupy phrasing of Buddy Holly that was quoted by Lost last night, ”Every day it gets a little closer/Rolling faster than a roller coaster/A love like yours will surely come my way.” At 50, though, Gull suddenly finds his calling in the form of a mystical mission to defend his country — an island, don’t you know — from an insidious conspiracy. You know, just like Locke. Gull is also, probably, totally crackers; he’s Alan Moore’s speculative pick for being Jack the Ripper. And while Locke is not yet a mass-murdering maniac, I have the strangest feeling, based on what we saw last night, that the architecture of his life is building exactly to that horrifying point.

”Cabin Fever” began by showing us the foundation for such a life: Locke’s birth. We’ve previously been given reason to believe Locke was born in May of 1956. But in the opening scene, we saw his mother, a rebellious 16-year-old Emily, secretly six months pregnant with John, dancing to that Buddy Holly song and primping for a date with an older man — presumably, John’s con-man biological pop, Anthony Cooper. ”Everyday” was released on vinyl in July 1957. This sounds picky, but timing is crucial in light of future events. I got that whiff of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men when Emily ran out in the rain and got hit by a car. No Country also featured an out-of-the-blue automobile accident, one that involved Anton Chigurh, one of three debatably unhinged dudes who drive McCarthy’s plot and the one who serves as the author’s embodiment of terrifying inevitability, a mass-murdering monster formed in the William Gull-From Hell mold.

Struck down by…well, we never saw who was behind the wheel, did we? Maybe that’s important, maybe not, or maybe not yet, but anyway, Emily was rushed to the hospital, and with that, John Locke entered the world three months ahead of time. ”He’s okay,” said the nurse. ”He’s just a little early.” As Preemie John was wheeled away in a toasty incubator that looked like a microwave oven (talk about cabin fever!), Emily cried out her wish that the boy be named John. Now, all of that should have sounded familiar to you. Flashback one year ago this week, in which Lost gave us another cheery Mother’s Day edition, ”The Man Behind the Curtain.” That episode told the origin story of Benjamin Linus, who, if you recall, was also born prematurely, and also born to a woman named Emily who cried out his name, although she did so as she died. Some points of difference: Ben was raised by his biological father (oops), while Locke was given up for adoption and raised in foster care. Also, Ben was born about five years after Locke; call it 1963. But as it so happens, Locke’s fifth year was a key marker in his fate-whipped trajectory, for it brought Richard Alpert into his life.

We had seen the forever young Other No. 2 earlier in the episode, checking in on Preemie Locke and beaming like some admiring magus from the east. Or west. Or wherever in Christendom the Island is/was/will be positioned in the space-time continuum. Returning five years later, the wise man unexpectedly dropped in on Locke as the boy was playing backgammon, much to the consternation of his sister. Alpert claimed to be with a school that catered to ”extremely special” children. He said that Locke could be a candidate for his institution and wanted to assess his aptitude. And then, after puzzling over one of John’s drawings — a stick-figure man bowled over by a cyclone of black scribble (Smokey?) — Alpert gave Locke a test, and with that, Lost gave us a scene so dense with (potential) subtext it just might take all of the forthcoming eight-month hiatus to unravel it.

The test involved Alpert setting six objects in front of John. They were a baseball mitt; an old tome titled Book of Laws; a corked vial containing a granular substance (sand?); a compass; a Mystery Tales comic book (”What was the secret of the mysterious ‘Hidden Land’?” asked the cover; other stories in the issue were ”The Travelers” and ”Crossroads of Destiny”); and a knife. ”I want you to look at these things, and think about them,” said Alpert. ”Now…which of these belong to you…already?” There will surely be a great debate on how to interpret that ”already.” To me, it seemed that Alpert was asking Locke to consider looking forward into his life for these objects — as if for people like Alpert and perhaps Locke, past, present, and future happen all at once. That’s just my take, and anyway, Locke seemed to fail the test. He slid the vial toward him and off to the side. Then he picked up the compass and set it down. Both of these actions seemed to please Alpert. But then Locke chose the knife and held on to it, and even seemed to enjoy holding on to it, like a knight getting the feel of his sword. Alpert was not only crestfallen but vaguely pissed. ”I’m afraid John isn’t ready for our school,” he said as he left in a huff, and raced out to…catch the next time machine back to the Island?

This is where Lost nutjobs like me lose our minds, or at least much sleep — deconstructing scenes like these. As it turns out, these six objects are portals that, if opened, can flood your mind with possibilities on how to ”read” the show. Taken individually and separately — and further reinforced by other winks and nods throughout the episode — these embedded clues can link provocatively to The Uncanny X-Men (may I recommend Giant Size X-Men #1, in which ”new” X-Men must save ”old” X-Men from ”Krakoa, The Living Island”); Jewish and Mormon history; Egyptian mythology; Freemason conspiracy theory; and, yes, even that From Hell business. The underlying connection: ‘’special people” and ”chosen people,” tapped by fate, biology, or higher powers to execute great work in the world, often in secret. In a word: ”Others.”

But the Book of Law reference is worth focusing on for a few sentences, because it strikes me as proof positive that the writers of Lost not only are keenly aware of how its cultists scrutinize their work but mischievously play to this crowd too. After all, Book of Law evokes a bona fide cult text — or should I say occult text? It’s called The Book of the Law, written in 1904 by ”the wickedest man on the planet,” Aleister Crowley. The book extols the philosophy of Thelema, which is summed up thusly: ”Do what thou wilt.” Or, in the words of Lost-cited Mama Cass, ”Make your own kind of music/Make your own special song.” Or, as 16-year-old John Locke raged in the character’s third flashback scene, ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” This came after a bunch of bullies locked Locke in a locker — continuing a recurring theme of a boxed-in confinement throughout the episode — and a kindly teacher encouraged John to attend a summer science camp run by Mittelos, which we know is the off-Island outfit run by the Others. But the brainy Locke refused. He didn’t want to be a man of science — he wanted to be a boy of action. Play sports. Go on adventures. Play with knives and hunt some boar, presumably. His teacher responded, ”You can’t be the prom king. You can’t be the quarterback. You can’t be a superhero.”

I guess that’s some pretty good advice to get from a teacher, though I think a very sharp point was being made by keeping the name of the school’s athletic teams in constant view during the whole scene: the Knights. Locke might be a geek by nature, but he lives in a culture that idolizes the stud. Toss in the female issues in his life — abandoned by his mother, only conditionally loved by his foster mother and sister — and factor in the daddy anger and desperate-for-purpose disposition, and you have the portrait of a conflicted, impotent man yearning for clarity and empowerment. Such men are known to make very stupid choices — and sometimes, deadly ones. See: Benjamin Linus.

Which brings me to the provocative Big Idea that I strongly believe ”Cabin Fever” was jerking its head toward, hoping that we would ”get it” without spelling it out. There was a moment last night when Ben accused Locke of manipulating Hurley into going with them to Jacob’s cabin by using Ben-patented reverse psychology. Locke denied doing so, saying, ”I’m not you.” Ben jumped on this, saying, ”You’re certainly not.”

Now, do the timeline math.

Locke is born early. At age 5, he takes a test that most likely would have taken him to the Island if he had passed. He didn’t. That same year, Benjamin Linus is born. At age 16, Locke is invited to go to a science camp that again would have taken him to the Island. He refused. About that same time, Benjamin Linus and his father joined the Dharma Initiative. The implication, it seems, is that Ben has been walking the path that was originally meant for Locke. Ben was the contingency plan — the course correction — for Locke’s altered destiny. But Ben is his own person, of course, and he has done things differently from what Locke would have done, and this, in turn, has created further changes in the original order of things — changes that I think a certain ticked-off, Island-deprived billionaire named Charles Widmore is trying to reverse. The scene at the rehab center between paralyzed adult Locke and his wheelchair pusher, the creepy Matthew Abbaddon — who accepted the description of ”orderly” with knowing irony — was meant to suggest one way Widmore is scheming to restore the original order: by getting Locke on that Island and taking back the birthright that was supposed to be his.

(Unless I’m getting this reversed: What if Ben was the man of destiny, but for decades, various forces — including Alpert and Widmore-Abbaddon — have been vainly trying to change destiny by getting Locke to the Island to supplant the über-Other?)

Regardless, here’s the twist — the twist that could turn Locke into a mass murderer of sorts. As we saw at the end of the episode, Locke’s plan for saving the Island is moving the Island. Now, I have no idea how he intends to do that. But if I’m tracking correctly the weird science Lost has been laying down this season, I wonder if where we’re headed is a catastrophic gambit in which Locke will move the Island not only in space but also in time, which I’m guessing will cause some kind of massive retroactive course correction — or, rather, already has enacted a course correction. In fact, I wonder if the secret to many of the metaphysical mysteries of Lost is that all of the show’s drama is playing out against the backdrop of a timeline that’s in flux — where old history is giving way to new history as the consequences of Locke’s future Island-saving actions trickle down through time. And so that wreckage of Oceanic 815 at the bottom of the ocean? That isn’t a hoax — at least, not in the new timeline taking hold. That’s real. And it will be John the Quantum Ripper’s fault.

OTHER THINGS

Locke’s dreamy encounter with dead Dharma dude Horace Goodspeed We learned that ”Jacob’s cabin” was actually built by the Dharma mathematician as a getaway pad for himself and his wife, Olivia. But other than tip Locke off to the whereabouts of the map that could help him find his now on-the-loose lodge, Goodspeed didn’t give up any more factual info. Other details may be symbolic or foreshadowing of events to come. Did the nosebleed mean that Horace was a Dharma time traveler? Was the looping nature of the dream a clue that the castaways are caught in a time loop? And where was Olivia?

Ben’s big Purge spill In between griping about not being the Island’s chosen boy anymore (you buying that?) and how fate can be a ”fickle bitch” (great line — and possibly yet another punch at Locke’s issue buttons; I don’t totally believe Ben isn’t in complete control of what’s currently going down), Ben revealed that he hasn’t always been the leader of the Others — and that he didn’t order the Purge. So who preceded him in leadership? And who ordered the gassing of the Dharma barracks? Michael Emerson’s line reading — as always, perfectly intoned to suggest a multiplicity of possibilities — seemed to hint that it might be someone we know. So maybe Charles Widmore? Time-looped John Locke? Who?

The death of the freighter doctor First, let me say that I think Kevin Durand, the actor who plays Keamy, is emerging as a real find this season; he plays that mercenary part with a scene-stealing mix of menace and damaged vulnerability. Profoundly angry — and profoundly spooked — by his ill-fated Island excursion to extract Ben, Keamy rallied his merc squad with a ”torch the Island” mandate. To that end, he pulled out a secret Dharma file that revealed to him where Ben will probably go next (what was that — the script for the season finale?) (just kidding — Ben’s destination is probably the Orchid station), then he shot the captain and slit the freighter doc’s throat to motivate Lapidus to fly him back to the Island. Keamy’s sarcastic line after dumping the doc overboard was interesting: ”Did that change anything?” It changed more than Keamy could imagine. As we saw in ”The Shape of Things to Come,” the doc’s corpse traveled through the offshore anomaly and washed up on the beach in the past. As a result, Jack and company confronted Faraday and Charlotte and finally confirmed that the freighter folk aren’t there to save them. This is all to say that, thanks to the doc’s death, Jack’s camp knows to either avoid that helicopter or, if they follow after it, do so cautiously, and with a battle plan in their back pocket, just in case.

Finally, where was Jacob? When Locke went into Jacob’s shack, he found the grumpy old specter was still out to lunch. But a spry Ghost Christian Shephard played his representative, and his daughter/sidekick/death friend (?) Claire sat nearby flashing an array of coy smiles, implying some kind of enlightenment or some kind of evil. What do you think? Is she dead? I think so. And where did Jacob go? Was it just me, or did anyone else think that Locke in the wheelchair at the hospital looked similar to the Jacob we’ve seen, if he had a little more hair. Finally: Are you thinking that Locke spent more time inside Jacob’s shack than we saw? Do you think there was more to his meeting than just ”Move the Island, dude”?

– by Jeff Jenson of EW.com

I’ll get to why I think Claire is actually a ghost in a minute — but first, a word about Alice.

Alice of Alice in Wonderland fame, of course. You’d think Lost was trying to tell us something the way it keeps pointing toward Lewis Carroll’s beloved children’s book on its bookshelf. In last night’s episode, ”Something Nice Back Home,” flash-forward Jack — enjoying domestic bliss with flash-forward Kate — read a whole stinkin’ passage from the thing as he put flash-forward Aaron to bed. Perhaps by Lost’s last episode, if not sooner, we will realize that Carroll’s topsy-turvy underworld was a clue to the show’s essential metaphysical enigma; perhaps, for example, the castaways have literally tumbled into a hidden, beyond-microscopic dimension tucked into the seams of reality, as described by current superstring physicists. (For those of you who insist on a ”hard science” explanation of Lost, check out The Elegant Universe, which makes such a scenario plausible.) But the specific Alice in Wonderland reference cited in last night’s episode (taken from the book’s second chapter, ”The Pool of Tears”) reminded us anew that Lost is first and foremost about its characters, and more deeply, the tough, often impenetrable mystery of ourselves:

”Alice took up the fan…and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: ‘Dear, dear, how queer everything is today. And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning?…If I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.’ ”

”The Pool of Tears” is a transitional chapter in Alice’s adventure. She’s just fallen out of her world but finds herself stuck in a stuffy corridor on the other side of a door leading into Wonderland proper. As she ponders the riddle of herself and the problem of opening the door — a problem because the door is rather tiny and she has grown very large thanks to a piece of magic cake — she cools herself with a fan left behind by the White Rabbit, oblivious of the fact that the very act of fanning is magically making her smaller. The dilemma is making her weep: Poor Alice can’t figure out how she fits — literally — in her new world. (I swear to you, this is relevant.) Similarly, ”Something Nice Back Home” was partly a transitional passage in the Lost saga, a busywork episode designed to put all the characters in position for the year’s big finale, a three-part affair that starts in two weeks. Jin cut a secret deal with Charlotte, Claire went MIA, Christian Shepherd bonded with his grandson, flash-forward Hurley went nutty, and flash-forward Kate did secret favors for left-behind Sawyer. But mostly, it was about Jack.

For those with long, telescoping memories, the tenth episode of the show’s fourth season provocatively communed with the fifth episode of the first season, ”White Rabbit.” This was the episode where Jack — pushed hard by Locke to become a leader and distraught over failing to save a drowning castaway named Joanna — began seeing visions of his father on the Island. Chasing after Ghost Dad, Jack found the Caves of Mystery: Adam and Eve skeletons, black and white rocks, and Christian Shepherd’s empty coffin. In the flashback, we were introduced to Jack’s deeply rooted daddy issues. In one scene, Christian ridiculed his young son for trying to save another kid from a playground beating: ”Don’t play the hero, Jack. You don’t have what it takes.”

And so it went that ”Something Nice Back Home” began with Jack’s iconic eyeball flittering awake, an ironic wink at the first scene of Lost’s very first episode, in which the good doctor, having just fallen from the sky, pops awake and springs into life-saving Hero of the Beach mode. He staggered out of his tent and into a squabble between his castaway friends and Faraday and Charlotte; apparently, the sat-phone-turned-telegraph wasn’t working as it did last episode, when Camp Jack came to grips with the hard truth that the freighter folk have exactly zero interest in taking them off the Island. Despite being sick as a dog (”Food poisoning,” he said), Jack tried to play his elected part of commander in chief: He vowed to vanquish those freighter evildoers should they attack, and he renewed his pledge to formulate an exit strategy out of their tropical, possibly quantum quagmire. ”I’ve gotten us this far,” he said, groggy and pale. ”I said I was gonna get us off the Island, all of us. I promised that I would….” Then he fell flat on his face.

As it turned out, Jack didn’t have a stomach bug but appendicitis — the kind of hardcore castaway survival plotline we haven’t really seen since season 1. Combined with a strong character-driven ”flash” story, it was very old school Lost. (Cut to the chase: Juliet performed surgery; Jack’s okay, though that sloppy stitch looks like it could easily bust open in any freighter skirmishing to come.) The appendix is a weird thing. It’s an utterly useless organ that, paradoxically, turns deadly when inflamed. If I were smart enough, I might be able to explicate a theory that suggests Jack’s toxic appendix was a symbol of his seemingly dormant psychological baggage, which catastrophically ruptured in his flash-forward story. So I’ll just leave it at that. We learned that shortly after Kate’s trial, Jack got over his aversion to Aaron (though it wasn’t explained how or why he was so anti-Aaron to begin with) and shacked up with the former fugitive. ”Something Nice at Home” sure offered a lot of nice things for all the Jate ’shippers out there — rumpled sheets and red panties, a sexy post-shower smooch, and even a marriage proposal. But the omens of relationship collapse — caused by Jack’s backslide into old, self-destructive patterns (jealousy, paranoia, insecurity) — were planted early. There was Jack stepping on a toy Millennium Falcon and grumbling ‘’son of a bitch!” (Not a fatherly thing to say, and certainly not a nice way to talk about your half sister.) There was also the sports news of the day: Jack’s beloved Red Sox had just been swept by those damn Yankees. So much for reversing the curse…

…and so much for Jack reversing the destructive influence of his accursed father issues. Initially, he appeared to have made peace with his past. He actually spoke nice of Christian, warmly recalling to Kate that he had been a great storyteller. But he was also nagged by doubts that he could ever be a decent dad himself, much in the same way that he was nagged by doubts that he could be a good husband to Sarah. Alas, he was given reason to indulge these anxieties after being summoned to the Santa Rosa Mental Health Facility for an emergency meeting with Hurley. Talk about Alice in Wonderland links: We learned Hurley had become as mad as the Hatter — a character, intriguingly enough, who believed he had literally murdered time. More to the point of the episode’s cited passage, Hurley had become like Alice: despairing over how he fit into the post-Island world, puzzling over the man he was — or wasn’t. Off his meds, Hurley had come to believe that he was dead, that his after-Island life was actually the afterlife, that his doctor wasn’t real, and that Ghost Charlie was visiting him and imparting important intel intended for Jack. The messages: (1) that Jack ”wasn’t meant to raise him” (presumably, ” him” means Aaron) and (2) that Jack himself was about to get haunted. Jack — not courageous enough to engage in Hurley’s kind of self-reflection (and all the worse for it) — tersely told his friend to get back on his meds and left, trying hard not be spooked. But he was.

And so it went that during a late night at the hospital, Jack was lured by the bleatings of a malfunctioning fire alarm to the lobby, where his father was waiting. ”Jack,” he said sharply, causing his son to almost jump out of his tattooed skin. Actually, it played more like the instinctive flinch of a battered dog, reacting to his master’s raised hand. Christian quickly vanished after that, but it was enough to make an impact on Jack. He asked a colleague for some anti-anxiety meds, then went home and washed the pills down with beer. Jack’s transformation into a pill-popping, booze-guzzling, airplane-crash-yearning, bridge-jumping-wannabe grizzly bear had begun.

Sealing the deal was his mounting paranoia that Kate was pulling a Sarah and stepping out on him. And as it turned out, Kate did have another man on her mind: Apparently, she had been secretly fulfilling a promise she made to Sawyer before leaving the Island. (My guess: The shaggy con man asked her to look in on Clementine, the daughter he had with con gal Cassidy.) Furious over learning he was still competing with Sawyer for Kate’s mind, heart, and time, Jack raged: ”I’m the one who saved you!” Does he actually love this woman, or does he view her as some reward for being a good boy? Connecting that back to Jack’s statements to his fellow castaways earlier in this episode (”I’ve gotten us this far. I said I was gonna get us off the Island, all of us. I promised that I would ”) and even further to the hurtful, defining comments of his father in ”White Rabbit” (”Don’t play the hero, Jack. You don’t have what it takes”), and what you have is one really complicated guy whose savior complex not only is an expression of his damage but gets in the way of his own redemption. Jack might be a good man, but he’s a control freak (see: insisting on observing and guiding his own surgery) who hates himself and will sabotage any chance at happiness that he gets (see: driving Kate away). For Jack, there will never be ‘’something nice back home” — both literally and spiritually — until he gets over himself.

Early in the episode, a perplexed Rose made the observation that the Island is a place ”where people get better,” not worse, which raises a question: Why did the Island allow Jack to get sick? If this question is indeed relevant — if the Island is truly a place that giveth and taketh away both sickness and health like some almighty, all-knowing God — my answer is this: The Island is punishing Jack for failing to learn the fundamental lessons it has been trying to teach him all along. The lesson? Let go of the past; stop trying to play the hero; cultivate the capacity to trust. I think Locke was dead wrong when he pushed Jack to become castaway commander in chief in ”White Rabbit,” because it set him on a course that put him in profound conflict with what the Island wanted Jack to learn. Maybe that’s why the Island is calling him back in the flash-forward future — to complete the finishing-school education that he flunked the first time.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

On the timing of Jack’s flash-forward The headline of Jack’s newspaper read, ”Yankees bludgeon Red Sox in series sweep.” The Yankees swept a series with the Red Sox late in the 2006 season (a historic five-game wipeout) and the 2007 season (a traditional three-game set). If you pause the picture (on a high-def DVR), you can make out the score 5-0, which is how the 2007 series ended. So I’m going to call it: Jack’s flash-forward took place in late summer of 2007.

On Claire If you were baffled by Claire’s statement ”at least I’m not seeing things anymore,” I’ll repeat the intel I reported last week: Apparently, there was a scene in ”The Shape of Things to Come” in which Claire had a hallucination after the freighter mercs blew up her New Otherton cabin, but it was cut for time. My hunch is that her hallucination foreshadowed the moment last night in which she saw Ghost Dad (now Ghost Grandpa) cradling Aaron by the campfire. ”Dad?” she exclaimed — echoing Jack’s very same exclamation back in ”White Rabbit” when he spied (and chased after) White Rabbit Christian for the first time. When Sawyer awoke and found her missing, Ghosthustler Miles reported that she took off with Christian in the middle of the night. Sawyer subsequently found Aaron abandoned in the bushes. Where did Claire go? Spoilery images released to the Web indicate we’ll learn the answer next week, so I won’t pretend to guess. But this thought occurred to me last night as I tried to make sense of Miles’ fixation with Claire: What if she actually didn’t survive the obliteration of her home in last week’s episode? What if she died? What if the Claire we’ve seen since then is some kind of spectral but physically tangible manifestation of Claire generated by Island magic, just like Eko’s brother Yemi, Kate’s horse, and now, apparently, Christian? Could that be why Miles is so intrigued by her — because he can sense that she’s no longer human?

On the Millennium Falcon Sure the toy was chosen for a reason. My theory? The ship’s notoriously erratic hyperdrive = the Island’s unpredictable time-space-bending properties.

On Hurley I found that the name of Hurley’s doctor — the one who he thinks isn’t really real — was ”Stillman.” The name links provocatively to Paul Auster’s trippy existential mystery novella City of Glass and a character named Peter Stillman, who has a mother lode of father issues, was the subject of a bizarre pseudoscience experiment straight out of the Dharma playbook, and who may or may not be real.

On Jin’s deal with Charlotte After discovering that the freighter lady can speak Korean — and intuiting a possible romantic rapport between her and Faraday — Jin threatened her, strongly intimating that if she didn’t make sure Sun was on the first chopper off the Island, he was going to mess up her buddy Faraday. It was a little shocking to see Jin’s underworld-heavy past reasserting itself, and it made me wonder what additional lengths he’d be willing to go to to save his wife. Would he be willing to hurt his friends? As for Charlotte’s Korean, the crazy thought occurred to me that perhaps this Dharma-hunting anthropologist uses it to converse with one of her secret masters, someone I suspect has more to do with the larger Lost mythology than we’ve been led to believe — Sun’s father, Mr. Paik.

Finally, on Jack and Juliet I liked how the episode neatly neutralized one of my least favorite season 4 moments, the Jack-Juliet smooch, with Juliet’s expressed theory that Jack was merely taste-testing which Island honey he preferred. Or Juliet may have been graciously giving Jack a way out of committing to her. Either way works for me!

One more Jack thing… In case you guys end up debating on the message boards the possibility that Jack’s mind might have been literally toggling back and forth through time, especially during those agony-induced blackouts, my vote is no.

– by Jeff Jenson of EW.com

WHERE THERE’S SMOKEY: Ben unleashed the monster on the freighter mercenaries

The future has become unknowable and unreliable — at least as far as the once great and powerful Oz of the Others, is concerned. ”He changed the rules,” muttered Ben, his battered and bloodied face dawning with horrifying awareness. ”He” is Charles Widmore, the man on the other side of the cosmic chessboard to which fate-whipped Ben is shackled. And in ”The Shape of Things to Come” — the ninth episode of Lost’s fourth season — the whiskey-soused, nightmare-plagued billionaire Brit made a desperate, most unexpected move against Ben in his mad bid to gain (or is that regain?) that which was once his in the past, or (buckle up for this one, kids) that which was supposed to be his in the future.

P
L
O
O
O
O
OOOOOOOOOOOOOP.

(That was your brain sliding out your head and onto the floor, wasn’t it? Don’t worry. It gets slightly less ridiculous from here.) (Maybe.)

Benjamin…Benjamin of Araaaaaaabia!

”The Shape of Things to Come” was one of those deliciously dense episodes in which the nourishment of revelation is mixed with huge chunks of sugary intrigue. Case in point: Ben’s flash-forward, a kind of Indiana Jones tale — that is, if said tale focused exclusively on that evil idol-swiping rogue Rene Belloq. It began in the Sahara, where King Other suddenly (but perhaps not unexpectedly) found himself lying in the broiling North African sand, suffering from a bloody wound on his arm (also unexplained) and wearing a borrowed Dharma Initiative-issued winter parka. Was that a gust of frigid air we saw escape his mouth? I thought so. If Ben can bend space and time like our friend Hiro Nakamura — and this episode was studded with clues suggesting he has the means to do so — perhaps moments before doing the old squishy-blinky he was hanging with Penelope’s geologists in the Arctic Circle. Or building a snowman with Henry Gale in Minnesota! Time to brush off my Heroes/Lost theory….

Seriously, I think we are looking at some kind of time-warping teleportation hoo-ha here. The name on Ben’s Dharma jacket merits investigation: ”Halliwax.” If you’ve seen the Internet-distributed orientation video for the Orchid, a Dharma station not yet seen in the show (but it will be — soon), you know it was narrated by the latest incarnation of Marvin Candle/Mark Wickmund, one Edgar Halliwax. You are probably also aware that the popular speculation is that the Orchid was conducting teleportation and/or time-travel experiments, perhaps using polar bears as guinea pigs. Did Ben launch himself into the Sahara from Dharma’s own Quantum Leapster? And when? Is that where Ben disappeared to when he ducked behind his glyph door? Or is his time traveling yet to come?

Like Ben, I’m getting ahead of myself. After dispatching two gun-toting Bedouins on horseback, Ben wearily trekked to Tozeur, Tunisia. (Famous denizens: Aboul-Qacem Echebbi, a poet whose famed poem ”To the Tyrants of the World” sounds like it was written for Charles Widmore.) Like Peter O’Toole walking out of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia, Ben walked into a hotel dusty and parched and checked in under his On the Road-inspired alias, Dean Moriarty. How often has Ben been here? He claimed that he was a ”preferred guest,” and the clerk’s nervous eyes confirmed that he was either an important client or a really notorious one. Oh, no! Not the guy who whizzes on the walls again! She was also a tad baffled when Ben fished for the correct date. It was October 24, 2005. I’ll let you guys research the date for illuminating connections, although I can’t resist noting that (1) October 24 is Take Back Your Time Day, appropriate to this season’s time-travel themes, and (2) October 24, 1593, is the day in which a Spanish soldier named Gil Perez ‘’suddenly appeared” in Mexico City, claiming that he had just teleported from the Philippines. Believe it…or noooooot. (My Jack Palance needs some work, huh?)

Of course, we must note here that Lost has once before brought us to Tunisia. Flash back to ”Confirmed Dead,” when freighter folkster Charlotte Lewis discovered the Hydra-station tag at an archaeological dig — the one that turned up a polar-bear skeleton. In my ”Confirmed Dead” TV Watch, I wondered if Dharma was using polar bears as guinea pigs in its time/space-warping experiments. But given the implication that Ben is something of a frequent visitor to Tozeur, I wonder if he’s the conniving agent responsible for the skeleton. After all, there is the increasingly popular theory — well promulgated in this space over the years — that dark forces have been manipulating the lives of the castaways so that they would wind up on the Island for the purpose of preserving (or destroying) the current timeline. Certainly the freighter folk could have been similarly manipulated; did Ben plant that dead polar bear in the desert to facilitate a future in which Charlotte came to the Island? Time will tell.

After Tozeur, globe-trotting Ben bummed it to Iraq, which also happens to provide a crucial setting for the book from which this episode took its title: H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, a work of speculative sci-fi in which a technologically oriented cabal based in Basra attempts to foist its notion of world-state utopia upon the planet. (Wells also penned a screen adaptation, 1936’s Things to Come, in case you believe that investigating a moldy movie for Lost resonance is easier than reading a moldy book.) What brought Ben to Iraq? Giving flash-forward Sayid his avenging-angel makeover. We discovered that early in his off-Island Oceanic 6 life, Sayid reunited with lost love Nadia and married her. Alas, shortly before the events of this episode, she was killed, and according to Ben, the murderer was an assassin in the employ of Charles Widmore. Ben’s pursuit of this Widmore pawn was merely an elaborate setup designed to manipulate Sayid into wanting to become his dark-knight avenger — confirmation of and payoff to Sayid’s cryptic assertion in the climactic twist ending to ”The Economist.” But the revelation here is that both master and servant — the Darth Sidious and Darth Maul of Lost — are motivated by deep personal loss. With just a few scenes to execute this business in a busy-busy episode, Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews did some really nice work selling us on everything we needed to know and feel about their angry, bloody alliance. (Coincidence or conspiracy? Bob Kane — creator of pop culture’s most famous heartbreak-spawned dark knight, Batman — was born in 1915 on…October 24.)

Ben’s V for Vendetta motivations were established in his part of the episode’s Island-present story, in which Widmore’s freighter mercenaries stormed New Otherton determined to abduct their boss’ nemesis. I liked the comedic touches: the high-stakes game of Risk (Sawyer’s foolish if successful play for Siberia foreshadowed Ben’s mad and unsuccessful gambit to save Alex); the ringing phone signaling the deactivation of the sonic fence (”I think it’s for Ben”); the ringing doorbell bringing Miles Straume into the action. (I was also amused to learn Ben was hiding a shotgun in his piano bench; so much for being under house arrest.) The action was intense; lots of redshirts got wasted, while Claire’s house was obliterated by a rocket, though Aaron’s mama herself survived. Kinda hard to believe, but I rolled with it. (FYI: A scene in which Claire experienced a hallucination/prophetic vision was shot for this episode but cut for lack of running time, but I’m told we can expect Claire intrigue to ramp up next week.)

The death of Alex was hardcore. Clearly, the girl’s executioner, Keamy, didn’t want to pull the trigger, despite his vaunted Ugandan badassery. My take on what happened is this: Papa Linus — hoping Keamy wouldn’t have the stones to kill Alex if it gained him nothing — tried to convince him that his adopted daughter, kidnapped from ”an insane woman” out of pity, really did mean nothing to him. It was a moment reminiscent of the coldhearted father-son square-off in the final act of There Will Be Blood. (I will spoil no further if you haven’t seen it.) Keamy put a bullet in the back of Alex’s head, anyway. Ben was devastated, naturally, but there was more to his soul-rocked shock than the mere sight of Alex’s murder. My interpretation of ”He changed the rules” wasn’t so much Widmore and I agreed to wage our battle according to a certain set of limitations and regulations, but rather, simply This was not supposed to happen. As I’ve long insisted, I believe Ben’s genius is derived from having knowledge of future events, via time travel, Desmond-esque precognitive flashes, or the other hot conjecture of the moment, time-loop theory, the idea that Ben has lived this life many times before. So a monkey wrench like this pretty much wrecks Ben’s entire game.

Then came the episode’s other soon-to-launch-a-thousand-theories scene, not to mention what might be one of the most important ”Easter eggs” Lost has ever planted. After yanking himself out of his stupor, Ben retreated to his secret room, the Island’s wizard scurrying behind his curtain to consult his gizmos and magic for answers. Shutting out Locke and company, Ben opened a wooden door carved with all sorts of hieroglyphics — similar to the ones on the countdown timer in the Hatch — and disappeared down a secret passage. As it happens, when I visited the set of Lost a few weeks ago during the filming of this episode, I stumbled on the glyph door. I’ll take my stab at decoding it in a theory in my Doc Jensen column next week.

But where did Ben go? For now, I’m going to side with what is certain to be the popular conjecture: that he crawled into the Island underworld and asked Smokey the hellhound to eat that bad man who killed his daughter. His ash-covered clothes would seem to confirm that. So would the fearlessness and glee on his face as Smokey indeed thrashed the freighter mercs to death in the most spectacular display of Smokeyness the show has ever given us; it reminded me of the God storm unleashed upon the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. While all of this seems almost too obvious to be true, for the moment I can’t come up with any alternative theories, but if we were to find out that Ben’s hidden corridor leads to the Dharma Quantum Leapster (created, no doubt, using instructions decoded from that glyph door), and that in the five minutes he was absent from Locke and company he did weeks if not months of off-Island traveling (and grieving, regrouping, and re-strategizing) before coming back focused, strong, and empowered with the necessary knowledge to defeat his enemies, well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Island…

Jack wobbled around the beach, sick; the freighter doctor washed up in the surf, throat slit; Faraday telegraphed the freighter and told the castaways that all was cool, that the choppers were coming to rescue them in the morning; Bernard, who can decipher Morse code, busted Faraday for lying, revealing that what the freaky physicist was actually told was that the freighter doctor was still on the boat, alive and well; and Jack, finally resigning himself to the fact that Locke was right and he was wrong about the freighter folk, asked the question that promises to finally galvanize his season 4 story line: ”Were you ever going to take us off of this island?” Faraday broke his heart: ”No.”

I’m sticking to basics here, as I happen to know more than I can tell; reporting our recent feature story made me privy to upcoming developments in the Jack Camp arc, and I find it hard to analyze and theorize without betraying what I know. More on this next week.

(Fun Fact! The first U.S. transcontinental telegraph line was finished on — yep — October 24, 1861.)

In the episode’s final moments, Ben paid a visit to Charles Widmore at his London home in the middle of the night. Ben blasted his enemy for killing his daughter. Widmore — who has taken to self-medicating with MacScotch as a result of nightmares — blasted right back, saying it was Ben’s own damn fault that Alex was dead. ”We both know very well that I didn’t murder her at all, Benjamin….You have the audacity to pretend you’re the victim….I know who you are, boy! What you are. I know everything you have you took from me….That island’s mine, Benjamin. It always was. It will be again.” Ben then dared him to find it — right after pledging to get even with his game-changing opponent by killing his daughter, too: none other than Desmond’s sweetie, Penelope.

Widmore’s cryptic comments will no doubt be as debated as the glyph door. My interpretation returns us to the beginning. Ben and Widmore seem to be engaged in a war — a war for the Island, a war over time itself. For a long time, Ben was winning that war by either facilitating or managing a new timeline of events, one that denies Widmore his predestined life — a life that may have been ruinous for the entire world. But victory for Ben hinges on knowing or at least anticipating the future — and with Alex’s unforeseeable death, it appears Ben has become omnisciently challenged. Once, he was able to see the shape of things to come. Now, the future is as hazy as Smokey himself.

And with that — PLOOOP! I turn it over to you. What did you see? What are your theories? Why do you think it’s so important to Ben that Locke stay alive? What do you think is ailing Jack? Go!

– by Jeff Jenson of EW.com

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

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

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

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