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Plasma TVs, which use more electricity, can offer a superior picture because they can display truer black colours and have higher contrast ratios than LCD screens.

Choosing between the two technologies may hinge on price and how the TV will be used

It’s an inevitable question when looking for a flat-panel HDTV these days: Will it be plasma or LCD?

It was easier when there were only cathode-ray tubes and choice came down to size and brand. Now, we are confronted with different and confusing technology options. How do you choose between plasmas and LCDs?

Price could be one way.

Plasma HDTVs 50-inches or larger cost less than similar sized LCD HDTVs, but the price gap is closing, especially with the popular 42- to 46-inch sizes.

As for life expectancy, both plasmas and LCDs are capable of running around 60,000 hours, or eight hours a day for 20 years, before half brightness occurs. And they are both now capable of an exceptional 1080p HD resolution.

Plasmas are known to be somewhat of an electricity hog, but Barry Murray, marketing director at Panasonic Canada, feels that tag is a bit unfair.

“Government regulations require plasmas to list the maximum watts used, when, in fact, they consume closer to half that power in real-world conditions,” he says. “Plasmas light each pixel individually, as required, but LCDs always have a backlight running and block the light to produce colours.”

With all this in mind, how do we choose?

Ultimately, it comes down to how you want to use your HDTV.

If you are a videophile looking for the true home-theatre experience, an HDTV plasma might be the way to go.

Generally, plasmas are known for their superior picture performance because they can display truer black colours than LCDs. Plasmas can run a very low level of luminance to create the colour black and have higher contrast ratios than LCDs, producing a more detailed true-to-life picture.

LCD HDTVs are no slouches on picture quality but they still can’t block out enough of the underlying backlight to produce the same level of blacks as plasmas.

Plasmas are also believed to offer smoother and more realistic video motion with quicker pixel refresh rates, but LCDs are quickly catching up.

The new 120Hz refresh technology being incorporated in LCDs is considered one of the biggest breakthroughs in some time, according to Patrick Lapointe, director of marketing for LCDs at Sony Canada.

“Our MotionFlow technology (120Hz refresh) provides smoother motion and seamless action for sports scenes,” he says. “By doubling the number of frames on the screen every second, the eye perceives much less judder (instability) and blurriness than before.”

Viewing angles are also better on plasmas, up to an extreme 160 degrees. At that angle, you would be just about beside the screen with no loss of brightness or colour saturation. Higher-end LCDs like ones from Sony have decent viewing angles and are fine for most family room seating arrangement.

Of course, if you don’t have an HDTV set-top box from your television program provider or a Blu-ray DVD player, you just won’t get the video quality you’d expect. If your TV set-top box or DVD player doesn’t support the new HDMI interface, they probably don’t provide HD video.

If you plan to also hookup a PC/Mac or a game console such as an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you might want to consider an LCD HDTV.

While plasmas can do an excellent job projecting these, they still have a slight risk of burn-in, a permanent ghostlike image associated with prolonged display of a static image. LCD HDTVs are immune to burn-in so they are the safe bet, but they do suffer from stuck or dead pixels (permanently lit or unlit).

Another reason to consider an LCD is viewing distance. LCDs tend to have a smoother picture in a shorter viewing distance, making it optimal for using a computer or game console with it when you want to get up close. But note that if you are hooking up a computer, you won’t get a decent picture unless it has a DVI or HDMI video card.

– by Tom Katsiroubas of YourHome.ca and the Toronto Star

RAFT OF LIES Jack was the one who made up the cover story while it was finally revealed who was in the coffin: John Locke, aka Jeremy Benthem

A Moving Ending: While Locke and Ben succeed in their mission to displace the Island, we learn why only the Oceanic 6 escaped, why they lied, and why Jack feels the need to go back

The season finale of Lost was a major leap backward for the show, and I mean that with a big wink and much admiration for a powerful conclusion to a bold, winning season. ”Rewind” was the operative word for ”No Place Like Home (Parts 2 and 3).” An orientation film mysteriously looped back on itself. Old moments were revisited and re-examined, if not reinvented. Heck, the whole show was rebooted from the beginning, with Jack the Hero falling from the sky and rising to action and building a community out of lost souls, just as he did in the pilot. The final moments even ironically echoed the first season’s famous twin cliff-hangers, with a raft at sea and two men peering into the abyss of a dark box — the coffin of one Jeremy Bentham, who looks a lot like a certain boar-hunting bald man we’ve come to know, love, and fear the past four years. ”No Place” wasn’t the magic act of last year’s flash-forward fake-out, but it was more meaty, more emotional, more epic, and, with a gulpy leap into WTH? sci-fi, maybe more ballsy.

”OH, AND ONE MORE THING: YOUR BEARD SMELLS LIKE WET VINCENT!”

Here’s what I mean by rewind: The episode began where last season’s flash-forward fake-out finale left off, with Kate driving away from Beaver Pelt Jack, and then — screeeeeeeeeeech! — the former fugitive came to an abrupt stop and floored it in reverse. Apparently, Kate had a few things she wanted to get off her chest — stuff she forgot to unload on Jack in last year’s finale. She told him that his ”we have to go back!” crap was galling, especially in light of what happened on their final day on the Island; that a man they both knew — the man in the obituary, one Jeremy Bentham — had come to her a few days earlier and tried to make the same wacko ”going back” argument; that Aaron still doesn’t quite understand why Jack isn’t around anymore to read Alice in Wonderland to him before bedtime. She slapped him and told him to keep his distance and then drove off in a heartbroken huff.

I’ll keep the Wikipedia-informed digressions to a minimum in this TV Watch, but a couple words about Jeremy Bentham, another classic loaded Lost name. Bentham was a 19th-century philosopher associated with utilitarianism and liberalism. He also designed the ”panopticon,” a cylindrical-shaped prison that requires minimal security and facilitates intense paranoia. He was also buried in a bizarre box designed for public display called an ”auto-icon.” Bizarre. Clearly, one must consider comparing and contrasting philosopher John Locke to philosopher Jeremy Bentham, but one should consider those things when one is not falling asleep at his computer at midnight.

More interesting to casual Lost fans is this: The name Jeremy Bentham all but confirms as legit the obit text that has circulated throughout fandom since last year. There are many more curious details in this notice — including the suggestion of suicide that was raised by Sayid later in the episode — but why don’t you go over to lostpedia.org and read the obit yourself. We’ll analyze the implications next Friday in my last Doc Jensen column of the season.

FREIGHTER BOMB = ISLAND?

Desmond, Jin and Michael tried to prevent an intricately wired bomb from going boom by freezing it with liquid nitrogen. We learned that the explosives were linked to a dead man’s switch strapped to Keamy’s arm. If his heart stopped beating, the bomb would explode. In other words, Keamy had forged a symbiotic relationship with the freighter — kinda like the way the Island has formed a symbiotic relationship with all these castaways who it won’t let die until they complete their destined service. And how about all that ice? Later in the episode, we saw that the massive gears in the bowels of the Island were covered in frost. Was that ancient machinery deliberately frozen to keep the Island from going ballistic, as with the freighter bomb?

EXIT: FREIGHTER MERCS

The cliff-hanger from the previous episode resolved itself pretty quickly when Richard Alpert and the band of merry Others ambushed Keamy’s men and liberated their once-exalted leader. Did you hear the Whispers start their whispering just before the Others made their move? (We’d hear them one more time in the episode, and in a more unexpected, unprecedented locale.) I liked Keamy’s Hacky Sack action with the grenade, expertly kicking it over to another mercenary, who was then blown away by it. Ultimately they were all subdued, with Sayid taking down Keamy in a nicely choreographed mano a mano struggle marked by quit cuts and bloody loogies — but it ultimately took the last-second intervention of Alpert to settle the matter. ”Thank you for coming, Richard,” said Ben, sounding a touch surprised that Alpert even bothered. After all, last season, Richard tried very hard to manipulate Locke into taking over the Others from him. Indeed, and judging from his halfhearted acceptance of Ben’s salutation, Alpert wasn’t wild that the devilish Dharma kid was still in the picture. But he’d get his regime change soon enough.

Just as intriguing was Ben’s reaction to the arrangement Alpert had made with Kate and Sayid to secure their help in springing Ben: He had agreed to let them go. Ben affirmed the deal with a casualness that was almost glib. ”Fair enough,” he said. Even Kate was shocked. ”We can leave the Island, and that’s it?” she said hopefully. Ben gave her one of his patented bug-eyed stares and line readings that suggest layers of meaning. ”That’s it,” he said, clearly not meaning a word of it. The whole sequence echoed the end of season 2, when Ben fulfilled the bargain his people had made with Michael. Ben is a shifty dude, but he does good by the people who risk their lives for his — even if he never quite fills them in on the fine print that stipulates that those who leave the Island never really leave it until the Island itself is through with them.

”LEADERSHIP STUFF”

While the liberation of Benjamin Linus was under way, Jack and Locke met in the ruins of the old Dharma greenhouse to discuss ”leadership stuff,” as Hurley put it. Once again — for the final time — the man of science and the man of faith had one of their super-heated philosophical smackdowns about design and chance, mysticism and science. The battle was specifically about the whole notion of miracles and whether such things were possible or credible. And wouldn’t you know, it just so happens that season 4’s author-philosopher in residence, C.S. Lewis, wrote a book called Miracles that tackled the empirical debate that Jack and Locke embody. I’ll let you investigate that one at your leisure.

Spooky how Locke was able to see the dark road that lay ahead for Jack. He told his rival that he was going to have to lie about the existence of the Island and the remaining castaways, and he knew that doing so would eat away at Doc Integrity. I also thought this was painfully catty: ”If you do it [lie to the world] half as well as you lie to yourself, they’ll believe you.” Rrrowww! Frankly, it’s that kind of insight — and button pushing — you usually get from Ben. Guess the Other is starting to rub off on John. The Jack-Locke standoff climaxed with their eyeballs blazing at each other. ”You’re crazy!” ”No, you’re crazy!” But I got the sense that something like doubt was beginning to creep into Jack’s position.

One last observation: I have often made the mistake of articulating the ideological conflict between these two in ways that suggest Jack and Locke are exemplars of their respective stances. That’s wrong. Rather, I think Lost has used each to dramatize the limitations of adhering dogmatically to either worldview. Jack is a humanist who believes solely and foolishly in his own agency, while Locke submits himself to an external, exotic agency he doesn’t even understand. I love how Matthew Fox and Terry O’Quinn don’t play the heady ideas but rather the desperate, murky psychology underneath them. Jack stubbornly refuses to believe in anything but himself, while Locke has a hard-on for the purpose and power his exalted Island status has brought him. For Locke, the moment at hand held the promise of rectifying an entire lifetime of being kicked in the nuts by that ”fickle bitch,” destiny. ”Just wait until you see what I’m about to do,” he declared. Be very afraid.

WALT. WOW.

Damn, did that kid get big or what? There have been rumors that actor Malcolm David Kelly’s real-life growth spurt has impacted the show’s ability to use him, and now we can see why: There’s no way he can play the Walt we knew when he left the Island. He can only make sense in the far-future flash-forward scenes, now the show’s present, which happens to be our present: spring 2008. Chaperoned by his no-nonsense grandma, Walt paid a visit to Hurley in the mental hospital. ”I was waiting for one of you to come visit me, but nobody did,” he said, sounding almost hurt, if not downright neglected, and I couldn’t help wondering if some winky meta-resonance was intended in light of so much ”Where’s Walt?” wondering this season. The moment was brief: more cryptic Bentham name-dropping, more justifying the lie of the Oceanic 6 cover story. But it made me wonder if this scene was a setup for Walt’s joining next season’s Island search party. And we still need an explanation for the kid’s spectral appearance in last year’s finale. So hopefully not the last we’ve seen of Big Walt. PS: This is where you guys tell me about all the drawings on the wall I’m not talking about, like the ladybug painting, which, yes, I know, has been a recurring motif this season, but it’s already 2 a.m. and I’m only this far into this freakin’ thing. Another time, I swear!

THE FREIGHTER FOLK PUNT

As the last of the beach castaways were ferried to the freighter, we got some cryptic moments with the season’s much heralded new arrivals, the freighter folk — scenes clearly meant to set up arcs for next season. Psychic hustler Miles Straume announced he was staying on the Island — all the better to give Lost someone who can make sense of the show’s mounting infestation of poltergeists. Miles also confronted Charlotte on her big secret: that she’s been to the Island before, and was perhaps even born there. (I let out a whoop when I heard that bit of business, as this has been my Charlotte theory all season long, dating back to my recap of the second episode.) When Charlotte played dumb and asked Miles what he meant, the quippy ghost whisperer responded with perhaps one of the best line readings in Lost history: ”Yes…what do I mean?” We’ll talk about Lapidus and Faraday in a minute, but allow me say, one final time, that the freighter-folk story line got screwed by the strike, but I’m glad that the show gave us reason to believe that these promising characters will get their respective due next year.

MOVING THE ISLAND: ”EXOTIC MATTER,” INDEED

We come now to what will probably be the most debated parts in the finale, as it involved sci-fi stuff that I know scares a chunk of the viewing audience. Deep below the dilapidated greenhouse (how deep? ”Deep,” Ben said) lies the laboratory level of the Orchid, a Dharma station devoted to time travel. This whole sequence was dotted with great humor the Ben-Locke bit about not knowing what anthuriums look like; Ben sitting Locke down in front of the TV to watch the orientation video while he loaded metallic objects into the Vault — all the better to ease us gently into the weirdness to come.

The newest orientation film included a laundry list of sci-fi buzz terms: Casimir effect, space and time, electromagnetic energy, negatively charged exotic matter. All of these are necessary ingredients for wormhole theory. Or in the quippy-smooth words of Ben, it means ”time-traveling bunnies.” The most baffling part of the orientation-video experience was how it stopped and rewound before the narrator, Edgar Halliwax, could demonstrate how the machine was used. But this is a staple element of all the Dharma videos: the possibility of mind-game tomfoolery, which invites the viewer to question the legitimacy of the narrative.

Before Ben and Locke could get down to moving the Island, an interruption. A not-dead-yet Keamy crashed the party and tried to flush Ben out by bragging about his bomb and mercilessly taunting him about his daughter ”bleeding out.” Ben cracked, allowing emotions to get in the way of ”command decisions” (or so he claimed; you never know with this guy), and beat and stabbed Keamy. The merc died soon after, activating his heart-monitor detonator. Locke castigated Ben for dooming the freighter, which may have been his intention all along. ”So?” Ben said. (My wife wanted to know why, when Keamy passed, Locke didn’t just quickly transfer the heart monitor to his own arm.)

After coming to his senses, Ben dropped a whopper on Locke. Yes, while Jacob may have told Locke he had to move the Island, Ben reasoned that the actual work fell to him, because (1) Jacob never told Locke how to do it, and (2) ”moving the Island” has a consequence to the mover — he or she must leave the Island — and Ben figured Locke, being Jacob’s new golden boy, was indispensable. He told John his destiny was to become his replacement as leader of the Others, a coronation that would bring a proud, dangerous smile on Locke’s face later in the episode but in the Orchid made him a little angry. Wasn’t it his job to move the Island? Once again, Ben had pushed him aside. ”Goodbye, John,” says Ben. ”Sorry I made your life so miserable.” That’s pretty provocative wording for all of you who’ve speculated that Ben and his minions have been using the Dharma time machine to meddle with Locke life since the beginning.

Ben then donned a Dharma parka and descended further, into a subterranean region that was either ancient (the remains of Atlantis?) or extraterrestrial (the engine room of a big spaceship?) in nature. Maybe it was both. Inside an icy cave, Ben beheld something that came as no suprise to him: a massive stone wheel embedded in a glyph-spotted wall crusted over with frozen snow. Spitting some bitter words to an unseen Jacob, Ben started pushing on the wheel, activating energy on the other side of the wall. As he did, Ben whimpered, and for the first time ever on Lost, I found myself not totally convinced by Michael Emerson’s performance. Then again, maybe I’m just not used to seeing Ben playing big emotional moments that are unquestionably genuine, especially when he’s pushing on giant sci-fi donkey wheels. But basically, it was a breakup scene; the deep, profound symbiotic relationship he had with the Island, apparently already weakened by his faithlessness, was now being severed.

Anyways, there was a big sound and a blinding flash and the Island disappeared, and with it a whole bunch of people, including Locke and the Others. Combined with the freighter explosion, that left a lot of characters in drastically changed circumstances:

Sawyer sacrificed his spot on Lapidus’ chopper to make it lighter to save fuel. But before he jumped into the drink, he tasked Kate to execute an errand for him in the real world — presumably, I think, checking on his daughter, Clementine — and then planted a big kiss on her. And now we know why the ladies love Sawyer. As an added bonus, when he returned to the Island, he emerged from the surf sans shirt. (The yin to this yang: plenty of Kate cleavage shots for the guys.)

Juliet stayed behind to help everyone get to the freighter — then had a front-row seat on the beach to watch it blow up. Last seen chugging rum with shirtless Sawyer. You sense a setup for romance next season?

Faraday was last seen taking a raft of castaways to the freighter when the Island disappeared. Since the smaller Hydra Station island also disappeared, I have to assume that the move extended beyond the Island into the ocean. So I’m betting Faraday got caught up in that.

Jin was last seen on the freighter when it exploded. But if he survived and swam into the circumference of the move, he too could be wherever — or whenever — the Island is now.

Michael the castaway traitor earned his redemption by staying with the bomb. Moments before the blast, however, he heard the Whispers. Looking around, he noticed what appeared to be a videocamera in one corner (was it on?) and the ghost of Christian Shephard in the other. ”You can go now, Michael.” Then: Boom!

As for Ben, we now know how he wound up in his Dharma parka in the Tunisian desert at the start of ”The Shape of Things to Come”: Apparently, that’s where he landed after he moved the Island. The date: October 24, 2005, or about 10 months from when Ben moved the Island. So…where did the Island go? Nowhere. My guess is that it’s in the same spot where it’s always been — it just rematerialized in reality 10 months in the future, just like Ben.

Let’s blow through the rest of the episode quickly:

THE CREEPY KATE DREAM (?) SCENE

According to a sound file sent to me by reader Russ Boyd, the backward voice on Kate’s phone said, ”The island needs you….You have to go back before it’s too late.” The dream encounter with Ghost Claire — who told Kate, ”Don’t bring him back” — suggests that each of the Oceanic 6 is getting a ghost to haunt him or her. Kate and Aaron get Claire; Jack gets Christian; Sun would get Jin (though I hope not); Sayid would get (?) (he’s clearly the flaw in my theory); and Hurley has Charlie and…

”CHECKMATE, MR. EKO”

My other favorite line of the night — even Sayid seemed to smile. In Hurley’s second flash-forward scene, Sayid killed a mystery man keeping tabs on Hurley and persuaded the troubled castaway to come with him to a safer location. Hurley asked him if he was taking him back to the Island. Sayid said no. Was he telling the truth? Unresolved Season 4 Hurley Mystery: In the season premiere, Hurley told Jack he wished he had stayed with him instead of going with Locke. Now that you’ve seen all of season 4, if someone asked why Hurley felt that way, how would you respond?

HERE COMES THE SUN KING

The season finale included two great Sun moments: her out-of-her-skull hysteria over watching Jin’s apparent death and her attempt to form an alliance with Charles Widmore in the flash-forward future. (We finally got confirmation: Mr. Paik and Widmore are buddies. How much did Sun’s dad know about the Island before his daughter crashed there?) The anguish clearly established a lady with desire for vengeance — but who is she really after? Widmore? Ben? Jack?

THE LIE

After getting to the freighter for fuel, and then following the most suspenseful gas-pumping scene in recent pop-culture history, the Oceanic 6 (plus Lapidus and Desmond) took to the sky to escape the soon-to-explode freighter, then watched the Island disappear in a flash of light, and then crashed into the water. Everyone survived, thanks in large part to Jack. Repeating his lifesaving from the pilot, the good doc revived a waterlogged Desmond. Later that night, amid yet another conversation about miracles in which Jack flat-out denied the extraordinary event his two eyes had beheld earlier, the Island’s disappearance (this guy is as stubbornly scientific as Dana Scully), Lapidus spotted a boat approaching, evoking the Others’ tugboat advancing on the raft at the end of season 1. The castaways would soon learn that the boat belonged to a much friendlier entity, Penelope Widmore, setting up an emotional, smoochy reunion between the two time-tossed constants. But before that happened, Jack came around to Locke’s way of thinking: They would have to lie. About everything. The plane crash, the Island, their friends. I had a little trouble following the logic. The primary motivation for covering up is to protect their friends. But how can they even be sure if their friends still exist? I just wish Jack had rallied around the best, simplest argument for lying: No one would ever believe the truth. Of course, there’s a whole psychological theory for why someone like Jack would concoct this lie — but that’s analysis for another day.

THE COFFIN

Why is Locke in it? Why is he calling himself Jeremy Bentham? How did he get off the Island? Did he really kill himself? What happened on the Island after he left? How are Ben and Jack going to motivate their friends to go back to the trippy tropics — with a dead body in tow, no less? What are Ben’s ideas? And was it me, or did Ben did look unnaturally Alpertesque young? Do ex-Islanders start aging backward once they leave?

My mind, as you can tell, is now mush. I’m going to let it congeal, then think anew and return next week with more cogent analysis. It’s been a blast TV Watching with you this season; I hope to see you again in this space in eight months.

Until then, a prediction: I’ll bet you 20 bucks that either the teaser or the final scene of the season 5 premiere episode will feature one character — I’m betting Sawyer — renewing one of the oldest Lost mysteries by repeating the iconic question of the pilot episode. As they wrap their minds around the riddle of their mysteriously displaced Island, Sawyer — or someone — absolutely must say:

”Guys…where are we?”

BONG!

– By Jeff Jensen of EW.com

NUMBERS, PLEASE! Hurley can’t lose those digits

The Oceanic 6 present their cover story to the press but have to face their old demons; plus Ben and Locke try to move the island

Ominous signs of impending doom abounded in last night’s Lost. There was Flash-Forward Hurley’s T-shirt, the one that said ”Ace of Spades” — the death card, the card of war. There were also his accursed Lotto numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42), taunting him from the speedometer of his symbolically loaded Camaro, causing the soon-to-be loony-bin returnee to run like a proverbial madman. And there was the Orchid, our newest Dharma station, also known as ”the greenhouse,” perhaps the most foreboding omen of all. Operation Greenhouse was the code name for America’s A-bomb testing program in the South Pacific during the 1950s — a terrifying allusion in an episode where we learned that the freighter is a ticking bomb and that ”moving the Island” could be a perilous, possibly catastrophic endeavor. ”Doing it is both dangerous and unpredictable,” said a glibly cryptic Ben. ”It’s a measure of last resort.” Whatever it is that the Orchid can do, it was enough to cause Faraday to make an I-think-I-just-peed-myself face: ”We have to get off this island,” he told Charlotte. ”Right now.”

It’s probably premature to be jumping to conclusions about what any of this could mean: We’ve only seen part 1 of ”No Place Like Home”; the rest of it will air in two weeks. Then again, since when have these recaps been governed by common sense? ”No place like home” comes from The Wizard of Oz, of course, though the line is actually found in (Numbers alert!) chapter 4 of L. Frank Baum’s book, not at the end as in the Judy Garland movie. The title of that chapter? ”The Road Through the Forest.” Perfectly fitting for an episode that saw much jungle trekking and emphasized the importance of following carefully marked if treacherous paths, be it the route from freighter to beach or the scripted lines of the Oceanic 6 cover story. The episode ended with Ben getting knocked out in the greenhouse — and whaddya know, if we continue to use the Numbers as a guide, chapter 8 of Oz, ”The Deadly Poppy Field,” finds Dorothy passing out in a field of flowers. Perhaps the two-hour finale will correlate with chapter 15 (could ”The Discovery of Oz the Terrible” = Jacob?), chapter 16 (could ”The Magic Art of the Great Humbug” = Ben’s twisty, tricky secret plan?), chapter 23 (could ”The Good Witch Grants Dorothy’s Wish” = Charlotte fulfilling her promise to Jin to make sure Sun gets away), and chapter 24, which is 42 backwards (”Home Again” is clearly a reference to reincarnation/eternal-recurrence theory — I mean, clearly). (You’re going to miss me during the impending hiatus, aren’t you?)

Factoring in the flash-forward story, the second to last episode of the season mirrored the second episode of the season, ”Confirmed Dead.” Where that story whooshed into the near pasts of five new characters (Faraday, Charlotte, Miles, Lapidus, dead Naomi), ”No Place Like Home” whooshed into the near futures of five familiar faces: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, and Sun. Moreover, each of their scenes was tethered to iconic life-trajectory markers. We had Hurley’s birthday. We had the Sayid-Nadia romantic union. We had pregnant Sun’s fortune-making career move. We had Jack eulogizing his dead (?) father. ”No Place Like Home” cycled through the whole circle of life — and, possibly, beyond, if I’m reading the winks and clues correctly. I’ll explain as I recap.

THE MEMBATA AIRLIFT

The episode began with the Oceanic 6’s turbulent flight home. I’m not talking about the choppy air: I’m talking about the underlying tension aboard that Coast Guard rescue plane. From the jittery copilot rubbing his rabbit’s foot because of his bad-luck passengers (”the cargo back there…bad mojo”) to antsy Jack almost conspiratorially coaching his fellow Oceanic 6 members on the press conference to come. Jack seemed desperately invested in the bundle of lies the Oceanic 6 was about to spew. Why? As for the others, they were admittedly shell-shocked by…something. What? For a bunch of rescued castaways, their saggy body language screamed defeat instead of euphoria. There was also a slight whiff of disappointment with Jack. I wonder: In the denouement to come, will Jack’s sweaty, desperate zeal to fulfill his exit-strategy oath lead to shocking choices that will cost him their respect?

Regardless, these preoccupations were washed away when the plane reached Hawaii and the castaways met their families. The theme song could have been Paul Simon’s ”Mother and Child Reunion,” for it was the moms who got most of the love. Sun and her mom. Jack and his mom. Hurley and his mom. Cheech got an affectionate pat, but Mr. Paik didn’t even get a glance from Sun. Sayid was sidelined, though not for long; Hurley shared his family with him. But Kate and Aaron — poser mother and orphan Island child — stood alone and awkward. (By the way, I loved the wink-wink of the Oceanic Airlines publicist’s saying, ”They’re referring to you as the Oceanic 6. It’s not the best branding as far as we’re concerned, but it’s catchy.” For those of you who felt ABC didn’t play fair with its O6 puzzle marketing — Aaron wasn’t technically an Oceanic 815 passenger! — consider this your apology.)

HITLER WAS WRONG

”The Big Lie” is a propaganda conceit — attributed to Hitler — that argues that the bigger and more perverse the lie, the more people are likely to believe it. (Yes, I have reason for dragging Hitler into this; the Oceanic Airlines publicist, Mrs. Decker, shares her last name with Nazi flack Will Decker.) But the Oceanic 6 spin strategy went the other way: presenting a credible substitute for their utterly incredible situation. Decker gave us the overview. Oceanic 815 crashed in the Indian Ocean south of Indonesia. Eight people survived and made it to an uninhabited island called Membata. According to one online dictionary, ”membata-bata” in Indonesian means “ambivalent.” As in The post-rescue demeanor of the Oceanic 6—profoundly conflicted; hearts divided — is a compelling definition of ambivalence. On day 108, six of them made it to the inhabited island of Sumba. And that was that. Not one word of ghosts, polar bears, or smoke monsters. (Interesting fact about the inhabitants of Sumba: They’re known for their megalithic burials, in giant stone crypts. Megaliths usually bear symbols called ”cup and ring marks,” pervasive throughout prehistoric cultures; they resemble a series of concentric circles, just like the Oceanic Airways logo, or a spiral, just like the Orchid logo, spotted in Faraday’s notebook. These symbols reflect the belief of earlier cultures that there is spirit inside earthly substance, that all is connected, that time is eternally recurring. Or these markings could be some early Martha Stewart’s good idea of sprucing up a crypt.)

The Oceanic 6 had some curious things to share personally, too. Jack embellished the cover story with some survival-at-sea detail. Hurley defused a question about their healthy appearance by humorously accusing the reporter of commenting on his weight. (He also boldly announced he was giving up his restored lotto winnings.) Sayid flatly denied that any of the other castaways had survived. Sun seemed to struggle the most as she reluctantly, bitterly claimed that Jin never made it off the plane. But Kate’s lie had the most readily apparent implications. She claimed Aaron was her child — and tacitly confirmed a reporter’s conclusion that she was five or six months pregnant when she got on the plane. One would think that this claim could be easily disproved; time will tell if anyone investigates. Just as intriguing, Kate’s story messes up a lot of fan theories — including my own — that the Oceanic 6 would leave the Island by way of the anomaly and move forward in time. But who knows? Maybe when Locke reboots the space-time continuum with Orchid magic, we’ll get a new timeline that helps Kate’s yarn — and saves our theories.

A STITCH IN JACK’S SIDE = A STITCH IN TIME?

One of my favorite scenes in the episode was the sequence in which Jack and Kate stopped for a water break as they chased after Lapidus’ chopper. Kate noticed that Jack was bleeding from his appendix suture. He tried to pass it off as a harmless routine infection. Kate nailed him with that great line about Jack’s knack for lying like a politician by looking you straight in the eye.

But the scene started getting really interesting when Miles stumbled into it, resulting in a guns-drawn encounter that echoed their first meeting in ”Confirmed Dead.” Then Sawyer came bumbling in carrying baby Aaron. In the span of a couple lines, Sawyer quoted the concept of ”déjà vu” and likened Jack to a ”broken record.” Given how reincarnation and eternal-recurrence theories gained considerable traction last week with Richard Alpert’s Dalai Lama test of John Locke, hearing ” déjà vu” and ”broken record” in a sequence that deliberately echoed another scene in a previous episode — well, it’s enough to make you wonder if Lost was trying to tell us something. Or maybe it was just playing with us. Or maybe just me. Maybe Lost is a lot like the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, duping people into thinking his city is made of glittering emerald by making them wear dazzling, green-tinted glasses. In truth, his city was made of plain old white marble. I just got severely depressed writing those sentences. Back on with my crazy glasses!

Seriously, though: None of this has to do with why I loved the scene. I dug the Jack-Sawyer tension as much as anyone. How about Sawyer rubbing it in Jack’s face about how Locke was right concerning the freighter people? And how about Jack striking back by accusing the rogue of running away? But I dug it even more when these two put the sniping aside, find common ground, and play Superman and Batman together — in this case, saving Hurley from mad Island mystics Ben and Locke. I’ve always been a sucker for the rivals-who-become-allies arc in any kind of story. Rushing off to help Jack, Sawyer quipped, ”You don’t get to die alone.” Perfect.

OTHER STUFF

Sun’s hostile takeover of Paik Industries
In one of the evening’s most surprising developments, we learned that Flash-Forward Sun leveraged her settlement from Oceanic Airlines to buy a controlling interest in her father’s company. Her motivation: getting his respect. and possibly revenge. She held him responsible for Jin’s death and for putting both of them on the plane. Depending on how you interpret her lines, she seemed to imply he deliberately conspired to kill them, as if he knew the plane was going to crash. (She also said that Paik was one of two people she holds responsible for Jin’s current corporal status, whatever that might be. Do you think she meant Paik was/is in cahoots with someone else? Maybe Charles Widmore?) But in the words of my own father, who watched the episode with me last night, ”that must be one big freakin’ Oceanic settlement.” It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Sun is receiving additional financial support from other sources, like Ben, or even Hurley. Heck, maybe the Orchid isn’t hiding a time machine like everyone thinks. Maybe the dirty little secret of Dharma was that it was actually a secret gold-mining operation, and the Orchid was where the finished bricks were stored. The Oceanic 6 found the gold, took it, and are now drawing upon it to rebuild their lives and settle old scores with wretched enemies.

”Jesus Christ is not a weapon”
This line, from Hurley’s mother, just as he was about to club her — and his surprise party guests — with a gold-plated Jesus figurine. ”Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?” Hurley muttered to himself over and over again, evidencing an aspect of psychological ambivalence: the divided self. But what was up with the blinged-up Jesus? It conjured memories of the heroin-stuffed Virgin Mary idols, themselves complex allusions to Marx’s idea that religion is the opiate of the masses. So was ”Jesus Christ is not a weapon” a political statement? A reminder in an election year that Christianity should be a pursuit of spiritual experience, not a party platform or fuel for neo-imperialism? Or maybe it’s a clue — a marker, pointing to the possibility that the Island throbs with life-after-death resurrection power. Or maybe it means nothing. Just askin’.

”When have you ever been entirely truthful?”
This line, from Locke, was my second favorite line of the night. It came just as Ben, Hurley, and Locke arrived at the Orchid and Ben confessed that he happened to know exactly why Charles Widmore wants possession of the Island. (My theory: Orchid time machine = key to eternal life.) ”I haven’t been entirely truthful,” Ben said. Then came Locke’s retort, which was followed by no response from Ben. I couldn’t tell if Ben was just ignoring Locke, or if his silence spoke volumes. But this is the fundamental question about Ben, isn’t it? Why does he does do what he does? Is he some kind of Machiavellian Ben Kenobi, ruthlessly molding his Luke Skywalker for a showdown with a phantom menace that Locke was destined to fight? (I definitely got a Star Wars vibe as Ben almost heroically walked into the greenhouse to create the distraction needed for Locke to get into the lower levels of the Orchid.) Then again, maybe Ben is just plain evil. Maybe he’s leading Locke to destruction by bringing him to the Orchid — just like the evil magician Professor Hinkle led Frosty the Snowman to his death by trapping him inside a greenhouse, melting him down so he can steal back his enchanted hat. Or maybe his motives are more self-destructive. Maybe Ben wants out of the crummy Island life that was always meant for Locke — so he’s manipulating Locke toward changing history and negating his own timeline with the Orchid’s much-speculated time machine. Can I spin one more theory for you, this one inspired by the greenhouse scenes from In the Heat of the Night and Minority Report? No, you say? Move it along? Oh, well. Maybe next recap.

Other momentous things happened. Jack capped off an episode of telling lies to himself and others by saying he loved his father and missed him. Seriously? So much for honestly processing and exorcising the daddy demons on the Island. There was also that great scene when he met Claire’s mom and learned that Aaron’s mother was actually his half sister. What was going through Jack’s mind at that moment? How about I’m guilt-racked over leaving so many people behind. Some of them intentionally. And now I learn one of them was my sister? I am scum! I triple-loathe myself now! We saw Jin and Sun reach the freighter and have a tense reunion with Michael. We learned that Keamy rigged the boat with explosives; most likely, that gizmo he taped to his arm last week will set it off should his pulse stop pulsing. And Richard Alpert and the Others popped out of the woodwork like the cavalry-cum-Robin Hood and his Merry Men! In short, a lot to talk about — so get talking. And see you in two weeks.

– by Jeff Jensen of EW.com

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