The Shape Of Things To Come part 2

After Sawyer does his best Superman impression it's looking like the writers are having a little fun with us or Claire is Doomed (or both)? Sawyer: "You alright sweetheart?" Claire: "A bit wobbly, but I'll live." Miles: "Well I wouldn't be too sure about that." Punch-in-the-face foreshadowing? Or does Miles know that Claire will die? If Miles can speak with the dead, and perhaps even the whispers (which at this point seem to be made up of mostly the dead or soon-to-be-dead), he might have future knowledge over who bites the dust.



Back to the death of Alex; 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 cold hearted 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. Ever since Goodwin first mentioned 'the list' to Ana Lucia all the way back in season two, we've understood there are certain rules in LOST that must be followed. "We're the good guys Michael" and "We're not monsters" has always followed the assertion that the Others don't kill "innocent people". And while we might not know exactly what these twisted rules are, we know that Ben has been obeying them - at least in his own mind. ''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. 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. Many people were disturbed in the season cliff hanger when Walt was kidnapped from the raft but not me. I was a little more disturbed by the death of Alex. Maybe it was being told she meant nothing to Ben right before being killed or maybe it's just that I kinda knew Walt would be back but Alex is dead and death is more of a finality. But not always on LOST so it's not that bad I guess. I have a feeling Keamy will be getting his just rewards for killing Alex sooner or later. The way the writers are, I'm putting my money on the way he goes will be pretty horrific. Right now he's one of the most hated characters on the show and he has accomplished that quicker than Nikki and Paolo could.



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'' 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. Have fun decoding those glyphs. But so far some have decoded them to mean something like ""to summon", "time to summon" or "to summon time" on the top line. Second Line - "Protection", "Power" or "Strength". Giving us our four best guesses: "Time to summon strength" "To summon time protection" "To summon time power" or "Time summons the power of life". Decide whichever one you are most comfortable with and go with it. Ben strategically chose the house nearest the glyphed door, giving him some measure of control over the monster or at least a secondary method to keep it away. The sonic fence has apparently been off for while, but the creature hadn't come until Ben removed some other sort of safeguard within the cavern(?). When it did come, the creature passed over the house and went straight for the intruders. They were the main threat – they were obviously counterproductive to the will of the island. They weren't scanned or tickled or flashed; they were immediately dealt with in a manner consistent with a furious animal released after a long caging. I still don't think Smokey's agenda is 100% in tune with Ben or Jacob's, which is why I think the Others were probably scared shit less of it.



But back to Ben, where did he 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 hell hound to eat the 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 Smokiness the show has ever given us; it hearkened back to 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. After the chaos, Ben talks freely in front of everyone about meeting with Jacob. He provides Locke with both a direction and a purpose. Looking relieved, Locke hands Ben back the torch of leadership, both literally (as he hands him the torch) and figuratively. Both Locke and Ben have faith that Hurley can find Jacob's cabin because they know that he's seen it before. That's all fine and good, but what I can't figure out is why Hurley, of all of the Lostaways, is the one who can see the cabin now? And why can Locke no longer find it? Along these same lines, I kept wondering why Hurley ends up regretting going with Locke. At first I thought it would be because Claire gets killed. But now I think Hurley's regret will stem from helping Ben and Locke find Jacob. The other thing I wonder is why isn't the ghost whispering Miles going to the cabin? Wouldn't that seem the obvious choice here? Look for Miles to be going back with Locke, Hurley, and Ben soon.



Meanwhile, on the other side of the Island...Jack has the Meat Sweats

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.'' (Fun Fact! The first U.S. transcontinental telegraph line was finished on — yep — October 24, 1861) Now, let's assume for a minute that the freighter people aren't lying about the doc's condition. If the chopper's return journey to the freighter seemed to swallow a chunk of time, it makes sense that a voyage from the freighter to the island would regurgitate it. Yet the doc shows up dead on the island before he's even killed on the freighter (according to freighter time, anyway). Either way, we've finally got a definitive time difference between the island and the real world, and one that's a lot more than just minutes or seconds. In fact, it seems that the time difference has now reversed itself. Since the ship is anchored, we can assume the island must be moving. The cause? Desmond tore it loose when he turned the fail safe key. Daniel alluded to this with the deck of cards and his ominous comment that it was 'getting worse'. Maybe his ability to jump his consciousness through time and see things as they were (the cards for example) is degrading due to the island's movement. And with the island now slipping through both time and space it's no wonder Widmore's had a hard time finding it. As mind-blowing as all that might be, it's nothing compared to the revelation that the scar on Doc Ray's cheek has been replaced by a freshly, if badly, stitched cut in the same spot. The doc's body travels backward through the time storm to arrive at whatever period in time the island currently exists in (1996?), putting his body back into the exact state it existed at that time (when he'd just been cut). Applying this to the 815'Er's, this explains how Locke can walk and how Rose's cancer seems to have disappeared: upon waking on the beach their bodies were returned to the same physical states they were in at that past time – before those injuries. Doesn't explain how Claire was still pregnant when she woke up but we have a sort of history with pregnant women on the island. Maybe the island wanted her to stay pregnant.



London Calling

In the episode's final moments, Ben paid a visit to Charles Widmore at his London home in the middle of the night. I honestly didn't expect a showdown between Ben and Widmore, at least not this season. I always thought such a meeting would be more climactic than the quiet bedroom scene we were provided with, but it was far from disappointing. In the dialogue between the two of them, we learned some of the most important stuff yet. WIDMORE (to Ben): Don't stand there, looking at me with those horrible eyes of yours...[ Whoa, he went there!] "I know who you are, boy". This is the second time someones said that to Ben. The first time was not so long ago, when Miles told him essentially the same thing. I think he even punctuated it with an "I know what you are". Ben knows Widmore too. They face off like old arch-enemies. "Everything you have, you took from me", Widmore tells him. "The island is mine. It always was, it will be again". This seems to associate Widmore with Dharma. It also reinforces my belief that Charles Widmore has physically been to the island. Probably when Ben was a boy. He mentions nightmares, and I don't think he's speaking of normal everyday ones. Most interesting of all is that they cannot kill one another. It could be they're indestructible in the same sense that bullets would currently bounce off Michael's head. Maybe they need each other for something, or more specifically, they rely on each other in a Ying-Yang sort of way. A light/dark, good/evil, black/white sort of thing. As Tim Curry says in Legend: one can't exist without the other. Maybe Widmore is even Ben's constant.



When Ben accuses him of changing the rules and murdering his daughter, Widmore calmly corrects him. He tells Ben that he himself was responsible for Alex's death. In retrospect, this is probably true. In the past I mentioned how Ben had wanted something all his own, something just for himself, something not pre-determined by the will of the island. That something was Alex. Ben took her from Rousseau, took her as his daughter, and made her his own. If he hadn't done this, she might still be alive. Widmore calls him on it. Ben then dared him to find the island right after pledging to get even with his game-changing opponent by killing his daughter, too: none other than Desmond's squeeze, Penelope. 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 is. In the end, it seems they're both playing a high-stakes game. Widmore even uses the term 'game' during their meeting. Only now that Widmore has changed the rules, can Ben also? Does this mean that fate can be re-written? That's the trick here, maybe. The Shape of Things to Come might just mean that things to come can be shaped. The future is an open canvas - nothings really predetermined. Except maybe, for the ending of LOST.

The Shape Of Things To Come

LOST came back from the mini hiatus with a bang. With several actually. This episode we started to feel just how fast the writers are going to begin giving us answers. And before you even start I know that while they are giving us some answers they are also giving us more questions. Remember a few months ago when i told you that TPTB (the powers that be) on LOST said the smoke monster was going to be explained but it was not something that was going to be done in a fifteen minute scene? They didn't say they "couldn't" because they probably could. Why? Because they know it is one of the biggest mysteries on the list and they are not done with creating the entire mythology of the island and therefore since I believe Smokey is one of the oldest parts of the island myths we will continue to get more and more until we finally get the answers. Ben said he didn't know what it was, maybe that's not a lie. He certainly does know how to call it, but he doesn't know what it is is, exactly or how to control it. He then tells Locke that Jacob will answer all his questions. That part I have a harder time believing if the truth be told. Jacob, like Ben will only tell them what they need to know. Nothing more. Just like the writers won't tell us. Why? They need us to continue following the mystery. So with any mystery, lets start sifting some clues from this episode.



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. 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. But did he really? I'm not convinced that Widmore gave the freighters orders to kill Alex. We heard Ben run down the list of Keamey's credentials. He might be one of the loosest cannons on the island yet. He was a good soldier and he doesn't have a problem with killing. Maybe too much. Either way, putting a bullet into the back of Alex's head surprised me a little bit. Before the episode I was told someone would die execution style with a bullet to the brain. But I was also told it wouldn't be who I thought it would be. Well, from the previews my first guess was that it was going to be Alex. So I figured according to my spoiler it therefore wouldn't be Alex. And then it was Alex. One of the reasons I haven't been posting many spoilers lately is many of them are either very vague very obvious or very wrong. Seems TPTB are doing a better job of keeping the spoilers lighter than they were last season.




Indiana Ben found himself lying in the middle of the Sahara wearing a parka with the name Halliwax on it. Let's take a look at that parka for a minute that might or might not have been borrowed from an arctic station populated by two Portuguese speaking guys playing chess. Halliwax is the name of the man in the Orchid station orientation video. He may or may not also be Wickman and Candle. So the question is either did Ben think he was going to the frigid climate or just come from it? If you watch the scene again you can see some quickly dissipating frost around. Or could it be something else like say ectoplasm material dissipating when you "jump" in say oh I don't know ... a time machine? He looks shocked and pained and immediately he pukes up the same orange gak Ethan made Juliet drink before she unknowingly slept through her own time jump. This tells us two things: Ben knew in advance he was going to make the trip, and that someone was probably trying to kill him as he made his escape. He also comes with a wound on his arm. Is that connected to the fake arm that we have seen on one of the twiners from the Wickman/Halliwax/Candle trilogy of doctors? We have to be looking at some sort of time bending teleportation hoo ha here at this point. That's where the Orchid station comes into play. The yet to be explored station, but soon will be, may have been used to conduct teleportation and/or time-travel experiments. Perhaps they were using polar bears as guinea pigs. We'll have to ask Charlotte about that one. I have never loved Ben more than I did this episode. He smirks, he lies, he manipulates… standard Ben fare, but then he startles us with facets of his persona we've never seen before: ass-kicking time mercenary, for one. "Oh, you do speak English?" I cheered at that line and I hope I wasn't the only one.




After dispatching two gun-toting Bedouins on horseback, Ben wearily trekked to Tunisia. 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 poops in the corner of the room instead of the toilet." She was also a little weirded out by Ben asking for the date. It was October 24, 2005. I can't resist noting that October 24 is Take Back Your Time Day, appropriate to this season's time-travel themes, and 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. As a good friend to this blog once said, "Believe it ... or not."




It's Better to have Loved and Lost than to Never have Loved at all … unless you're in love with Sayid Jarrah, because that guy is an absolute DEATH-MAGNET. Fresh from the island he's managed to find, marry, and get Nadia killed – all within less than a year. Not quite as fast as he did with Shannon or Elsa, but an impressive time nonetheless. 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.) What was "the heart before the head" event that Ben referenced in "The Economist" when he bandaged up Sayid's gunshot wound after Sayid killed Elsa?
Recall this dialogue:

BEN: Why are you crying? Because it hurts? Or because you were stupid enough to care for her? These people don’t deserve our sympathies. Need I remind you what they did the last time you thought with your heart instead of your gun?
SAYID: You used that to recruit me into killing for you.
BEN: Do you want to protect your friends or not, Sayid? I have another name for you.
SAYID: But they know I’m after them now.
BEN: Good.

From what we now know of their first off-Island encounter, Ben didn't really recruit Sayid. Sayid jumped at the chance to work for Ben. So what were the two talking about above?

Here are three ideas:
1) Sayid later finds out that he played right into Ben's plan to get him to become an assassin.
2) Something happens to one of the Lostaways because of Sayid at a later point, and we don't know what it is yet.
3) All of the Oceanic Six were told to not contact people from their lives before the crash, in addition to being ordered to keep quiet about what really happened on the Island. Sayid broke one or both of those rules by seeking out and then marrying Nadia, and so whoever is behind the O6 cover-up had Nadia killed.
More so, what was the smirk on Ben's face after Sayid joins him? Was it just that once again a plan has come together or did Ben have Nadia killed? That may seem far fetched but it's LOST! It's a possibility but I am still holding out hope that in the end, Ben will be "one of the good guys.".





Back on the island we start to connect flash forward Ben with where his vendetta comes from. Widmore's freighter mercenaries stormed New Otherton determined to abduct their boss' nemesis. I liked the comedic touches: the high-stakes game of Risk. We see incredibly lucky Hurley loose a die roll (are these rules changing as well?). Up until now, the only person to beat him in a game has been Walt – perhaps the one person more akin to the island than anyone else. Hurley then goes on to mention that Australia's 'the key' to the whole game. Could LOST turn out to be just that - a giant game played between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore, with everyone else acting as the pieces? Well guess what? It already is.




When you've got a secret monster cave under your secret room, you definitely need a code 14J. And if you're in need of a code 14J, you gotta get a phone with no numbers on it. You're also required to hide a snub-nosed pump shotgun in your piano bench. These things just go without saying. As Keamy's crew unleashed on the barracks, Sawyer continued to accumulate hero points by going back for Claire. Splattered in the blood of red-shirts (one who was even wearing a red shirt!), he once again pulled off some very unselfish maneuvers. Sawyer's star keeps rising, and he continues to have the best lines of dialogue in the whole show. "Let me guess... "14-J" ain't the code for the pizza boy." "You harm so much as one hair on his curly head... I'll kill you." And I for one, believe he would as he is the only bonafide "action hero" in the group.




Sawyer's foolish if successful play for Siberia foreshadowed Ben's mad and unsuccessful gambit to save Alex; the ringing phone (that no one ever saw before???) signaling the deactivation of the sonic fence ''I think it's for Ben''. Code 14J as opposed to code 14W which states more wine-in-a-box is gong to be air dropped by a Dharma plane. 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 red shirts got wasted, while Claire's house was obliterated by a rocket, though Aaron's mama herself survived. Obvious she has more to do according to the island. ( A scene in which Claire experienced a hallucination/prophetic vision with Charlie was shot for this episode but cut for lack of running time, we can expect Claire intrigue to ramp up next week.) Perhaps my favorite scene of the hour was when the doorbell rang. It was played brilliantly, as everyone looked at each other with "Huh?" expressions and then scurried about trying to figure out what to do. And then there stood freakin' Miles. The only way to make if better was is Hurley had said "Who is it?" and Miles was to answer "Candygram" and of course Miles would have needed a land shark costume but c'mon how funny would that have been? Why did they make a point of telling Hurley to keep that baby away from the window? That's gotta mean something more than, well, keep the baby from the window.

End of part 1. In an effort to listen to some of my blog readers I am going to be breaking some of the episode chat into parts. I will post part 2 and a part 3 if needed later.

Meet Kevin Johnson

LOST is Thunderdome – anything goes. The show has constantly evolved on every level; characterization, story-telling methodology, and the mass introduction of new characters. And while we’ve been distracted by all that, the show has very subtly gone from spending more time off-island than on island. Two seasons ago, when chicken-suited Jin warned us that everything was going to change, we had no clue just how much.




Sawyer’s smirk rocked the room this meeting – I think Ben even seemed a little alarmed by it. Looks were very big in this scene. Watch Ben’s face as he stares at Aaron… a baby born on the island, a reflection of his biggest failure. All the plans he made, all the people he manipulated - yet this was the one thing he couldn’t do. He smartly approaches Alex, the only one he could possibly convince of anything. He tells her the men on the Freighter are dangerous. ‘More dangerous than you?’ Ben pauses dramatically here, knowing he has to convince his daughter to go. ‘Yes, but your mother will protect you’. Foreshadowing, or does Ben know exactly what’s going to happen next? My guess is he already knows that Danielle and Karl are going to take bullets in lieu of Alex. Watch Danielle’s reaction as Ben says this… it’s almost as if she guesses the same thing. She glances back at him quizzically, looking twice before closing the door.

At this point it’s easy to think that the Temple-dwelling Others shot Karl and Danielle. After all, Ben did send them down that way (or did he?) It’s possible that Ben’s convenient little map was a crock of shit. He could’ve stamped the Temple logo anywhere – neither Alex nor Karl knew there even was a Temple site. I think the gun-happy freighter jocks did the shooting. Last I checked the Others didn’t have silencers, and if they’re still in league with Ben, they don’t kill ‘innocent people’. Going along with that, I find it hard to believe Ben didn’t know where and when the gun squad would show up. Judging from his track record of being ten steps ahead of everyone else, I’d say he knew precisely what was going to happen. Telling Alex they’d want to use her against him was Ben’s way of planting the seeds that saved her from being shot. He knew it was the only way to keep her alive, and quite possibly get her into a position where he could use her later on. Sneaky, underhanded, selfish… but when you’re playing chess with human pieces you sometimes have to sacrifice pawns to gain position advantage on the board.

I also think Danielle will live – that chick is tough as nails. If she does, you can bet your ass she’ll be going very Rambo II in her efforts to get Alex back, especially since the last time she lost her it was for about two decades. This possibly lends even more credibility to Ben’s future sight, with his words about Danielle protecting her.

Hurley puts Miles right into season 4 check though: ‘Dude… we knew that like, forever ago’.



Since the dawn of LOST, we’ve seen recurring themes, people, places, and numbers. But the most interesting to me, have been the recurring objects. Some of them are innocuous, like chessboards and McCutcheon’s whisky. Others are a lot harder to explain, such as why the same Geiger counter in Locke’s season one apartment showed up in the Swan hatch with Desmond. Or why the alarm clock in Desmond & Penny’s flat sounded exactly like the countdown timer.

This episode, the Freighter’s klaxon horn is a 100% reproduction of the Swan’s two-minute warning siren. Sorry, but I’m not buying any more uncanny coincidences. If the island can have a conscience, an agenda, and even (if we are to believe Mr. Friendly this episode) an influence on people in the outside world… I give it enough leeway to have influence over the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and just about anything else in the show.

No one can ever accuse Michael Dawson of being lucky. If we are all children of the Universe, Michael is definitely not one of the fortunate sons. All indications are that, as an artist, he was never more than mediocre. As a father, he was an even more spectacular failure. Trying to find escape for his son, he got him kidnapped by wig wearing savages instead. And that was only the beginning. Like Cain, Michael escaped from Eden with innocent blood on his hands, and now, like Cain, he is condemned to wander the Earth as permanently damaged goods, too rotten and vile for even a mother to love. But the Island isn’t done with him yet. After taking away his son and his name and his soul, the Island has one more thing it plans to take from Michael; his own free will. As bad as it seems, I wonder if there might possibly be an upside in all this for Michael. Without free will, how can he be responsible for anything he does? If the Island chooses what Michael will do, then who is responsible for the things Michael does? Free will is a slippery metaphysical eel. Is it possible that free will is only an illusion we believe in because it feels true? Maybe all those times we think we’re making free choices, we’re only doing the thing it was always planned we would do. Maybe things just happen the way they do because there is no other way they could possibly happen. And even our free will, and the results of our free choices, are just part of the unalterable chain of causes and effects that can never be anything other than whatever it is they end up being.



The Hindus have a very simple understanding of this idea:

Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality.

You got that?

"You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave." - The Eagles

Karma. Still the ultimate bitch.

Even if we believe that some acts are freely willed, we have to concede that free will has limits. Even if you think you have free will, it will only get you so far. A man can freely decide to jump off a building, but once he’s free falling he can’t freely decide to stop falling. Free fall is about where Michael is when we return to his story in this episode. Michael may or may not be responsible, in the metaphysical sense, for the harm he’s created. But either way, he feels like he is. He’s being haunted by the ghost of his most innocent victim still carrying the blankets she held in the instant he ended her life. He’s lost the only treasure that mattered to him. Stripped of his Constant, Michael’s soul has come unmoored. Banished to a world where his free will is irrelevant, all of Michael’s hopes and dreams have been sucked into the black hole of nihilism. The only escape left for him is to pin a note to his jacket like a little lost boy and hope the Universe will have mercy on his soul. But the Island won’t even allow that kindness. Michael's tortuous journey through the despair of irredeemable sin is a profound topic. And Harold Perrineau got his chance to shine - another wonderful side effect of the End of The Jack Show has been watching so many fine actors strut their stuff this season. The concept of Redemption isn't nearly as neat and simple as fan discussions sometimes make it out to be. There's a vicious circle at work here, where the consequences of all actions will be forced upon those who commit them. There is no escape. Sayid may self righteously revile Michael for doing Ben's dirty work. He may think that's unforgivable. But we already know that Sayid will soon be doing even dirtier work for Ben. And we also already know no power on Earth will save Sayid from that fate. The story, where it stands right now, is in a very dark, very fatalistic place. It's completely understandable that Michael wants to get himself the hell out of here. But the Island isn't giving him any options. His suffering goes on. But hang on, Mike. One way or another, the Island can't hold you forever.

Or can it?

The great thing about suicide is that it's not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean, you can always do it later. - Harvey Fierstein



We found out exactly what Michael and his boy have been doing since leaving the island at the end of S2: Walt’s been battling puberty from his grandmother’s protective fortress, and Michael has been trying to turn over a new leaf. It’s extremely impressive that Michael had enough balls to tell Walt exactly what he did to get them off the island. He never thought to see any of those people again, and could’ve cruised through fatherhood without ever being found out. Putting Walt in a place where he’d be better off, even though it meant he couldn’t see him anymore, was a very unselfish move - part one of Mike’s long redemption process. Unable to live with his actions, he was genuinely guilt-ridden to the point of rocketing himself into a dumpster. Step three was buying a gun and pulling the trigger – another key moment of indisputable penance. And finally, with his son already safe, Michael was willing to go back to the island - something worse than even killing himself - on a mission to keep his castaway-mates from danger.

I’m not forgetting Mike gut-shot a pair of women who were just chilling out in the Swan hatch. But I am saying that Kevin Johnson is very different than the man who drove the boat off the island. By triggering the bomb sequence he passed his final exam - Ben was testing him to see if he was serious about redemption. At that moment Michael became ‘one of the good guys’ in Ben’s eyes. But then again, list-happy Ben might not exactly have 20/20 vision when it comes to what’s right and wrong.



Michael’s story filled in a hell of a lot of blanks for us. We learned that ‘some’ people can somehow leave the island, and I seriously doubt it was by submarine. Between the time the sky went purple and Jack/Kate/Sawyer woke up at the beating zoo, Friendly managed a trip to NYC and back, a nice penthouse suite, and maybe even a male escort. We got confirmation that Friendly is gay, although we could’ve surmised that from the way he throws a football and how light on his feet he can be in a darkened alley. Tom had been following Michael, and knew he’d been to the pawn shop to sell Jin’s watch. This was obvious when the first thing he said to him was: ‘Sir, you got the time?’

The island does have an influence in the outside world, at least on the people who were unlucky enough to spent time on it. Jack not being able to jump at the end of last season and Michael not being able to die… the writers would have us believe the island isn’t done with these people yet and still need them for something. Perhaps this is akin to Locke surviving his gunshot wound and Mikhail surviving just about everything else.



If you still need proof that the island’s reach extends beyond its shores, Libby came to Michael in the hospital. They dressed her as a nurse to open up the possibility that Mike was hallucinating as he woke up, mistaking the real nurse for Libby, his crushing guilt manifesting itself in the form of one of the people he killed. But nah – it was Libby. And she showed up carrying blankets, just as she did when Michael drilled a bullet through her solar plexus.

The second time Libby appeared in the engine room she was dressed in her death-garb, appeared for a split second, and then vanished like umbrella-less Harper, or underwater Charlie, or the rain-slicked Walt who appeared to Shannon.
Anyone else believe that after Sayid declares to the captain the Kevin/Michael is a spy on the freighter that the very first thing out of his mouth will be; "I know."? Watch Gault’s reaction as they present Michael to him - he’s not even the least bit surprised. In fact, he looks almost disappointed. I think he and Widmore knew exactly who Michael was from the very beginning, and were planning on somehow using that knowledge to find Ben. Sayid and Desmond just blew it for him. He intentionally called Johnson to “clean up this mess” to see if Michael’s ex-friends would approach him. Check out how he watches them over his shoulder on the way back to his quarters. I actually think Gault expected them to secretly buddy up together… he had no way of knowing that Michael committed double-homicide and was totally hated. The captain was completely caught off guard by Sayid turning him in.



“So he’s one of us now?” No, sorry honey. You’re one of THEM. Claire has it backwards. Ben hasn’t joined the 815 club, it’s more like Team Locke has joined the Others. Ben is currently employing Michael, he’s got Sayid working for him in the future, and now he’s pushing into position on Locke. Not only is Ben free, but he’s a few steps away from leading his own little group once again. And if they hook up with Richard and crew, it’ll be a much bigger group. The way Ben manipulates things to his advantage makes him so awesome. He moves people and resources around the island, revealing knowledge only where and when it leads others into doing what he needs. As I watched him send Danielle, Alex, and Karl away to their ultimate fate, I was reminded sharply of something Locke said a long time ago, when he was describing the game Mousetrap (which happens to also exist in Ben’s rec-room) to that little boy in the store:



“Well you start with all these parts off the board. And then, one by one, you build the trap – shoe, bucket, tub – piece by piece it all comes together. And then you wait until your opponent lands here on the old cheese wheel. And then if you set it up just right, you spring the trap.”



This is the very heart of LOST, summed up for us in season one.

Ji-Yeon

Crouching Dragon, Hidden Panda

Everybody Loves a panda!!! Especially when you really, really need one. Because that’s when a panda is most likely to be there for you, right? Right. Because as far as I’m concerned, the panda sure as shit wasn’t there the first time around. What the hell am I talking about? I’m talking about the fact that Jin can walk straight up to a store clerk who happens to be standing in front of a giant panda and somehow NOT see it. He asks for a panda and the clerk whisks him off to an aisle of plush dolls to uncover the secret hidden ‘last’ panda. And after Jin loses it in a Mr. Bean-esque series of trips, drops, and fist-shaking mishaps… he returns to the store only to discover a second giant panda resting next to a dragon on the shelf behind the clerk –right where a dragon (and only a dragon) existed just a minute ago. As so often happens on LOST, sought-after things are miraculously provided. From Sun’s pregnancy test to Charlie’s guitar, from Jack’s dynamite to Ben’s spinal surgeon… all things come to those who need them. The phenomenon goes by many names: suggestive manifestation, the magic box - this time I think it’s more along the lines of course correction. Jin was in desperate need of a damned panda and poof – there it was. Think I’m reading too much into this? Think I’m talking out of my ass? 9 out of 10 people do. But then again, those are the same people who still think the picture frame changes in Miles ghost-hunter flashback can be chalked up as ‘set error’.

So a doctor walks into a waiting room and says ‘Thank you for your patients’

Not that he needs the money, but Charles Widmore should rent the Freighter out for Halloween parties, because man, is this boat one freaky place! We got roaches, suicidal crew members, and blood splatter on the walls. (I loved the deadpan doctor's line: ''That shouldn't be there.'') And we got a heartless Aussie captain named Gault who likes to tell spooky stories about people who should be dead and yet are very much alive. Doc Ray is sent to retrieve Sayid and Desmond. For interrogation? For torture? No. He’s bringing them to the bridge so the captain can provide some answers. Gault brought out the black box of Oceanic 815, purchased, he explained, at great cost and through secret channels by his boss, Widmore. (The mention of his name caused Desmond's peepers to pop out of his sockets in surprise.) Gault told the castaways that the world thinks all 324 passengers were found at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Clearly, this was staged — but how? ''Where exactly does one come across 324 bodies?'' Gault asked. Then he put this conspiracy right at the feet of the man he and his freighter thugs had come to nab: Benjamin Linus. Our freighter questions mount: Why does Widmore have his ascot in a bunch over Ben? And what was that secret midnight mission Lapidus, a self-proclaimed castaway ally, went on?

Ha! C’mon, we’re four seasons in now and a lot smarter than that. Captain Gault’s mission becomes obvious this episode: to lay the groundwork for what will become Charles Widmore’s "story". That’s the only reason he would voluntarily provide answers. He freely offers up the name of his benefactor, drags Sayid and Desmond into his quarters, and goes to very great lengths to ‘tell it like it is’. For some reason at this point it becomes important to impart upon Sayid/Desmond that the crash is staged, Widmore is good, Ben is bad, you guys should really want to kick his ass, etc…etc…etc… Even over-eager Doc Ray gets in on the act while leading them back to their new brain-stained quarters: "He’s pretty forthcoming, right? Right?" Yeah, right. Except that Sayid’s sarcastic retort tells us that he’s already caught on. I don’t believe for one minute that Ben is behind the ‘staged’ jetliner at the bottom of the ocean, or the hundreds of rotting bodies, or the big elaborate cover-up (nor do I believe that Ben’s totally innocent either). It doesn’t take a "Don’t trust the captain" note for me either – I simply don’t believe Gault. Either he’s lying outright, or he’s been duped into believing and perpetuating that story by Widmore. And since so far we’ve seen nothing but a ship of fools – unknowing fools or crazy ones – I’d like to think someone on the freighter is in at least part of the loop.

I knew High School English would be good for something

As I watched trance-like Regina toss herself over the railing, the chains strapped to her body starkly reminded me of something – something to do with high school. Ten minutes later I had it: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The freighter was the ship from the story, stuck dead and motionless upon an endless ocean. The island was the albatross, chained around the crew’s necks – they’d spent too much time there and now they were doomed. They can’t move, they can’t flee, and they can only suffer for their folly. The most chilling part of this episode was not seeing that future Jin was dead. It wasn’t when Kevin Johnson emerged from the shadows and Michael’s face came into view (although that was awesome). No, the most chilling part of the episode was when doc Ray was leading them to the ‘quiet part of the ship’. Desmond responded with ‘but this ship is not moving’, and with a shrug the doctor replied: "Well if you say so…"

Hurley Rocks a mean suit

As sad as the whole Sun/Jin story was this episode, the only real mystery there is what happens to Jin. I think our best guess at this point is that whatever happens to him happens to Claire, Sawyer, Rose, Bernard, and everyone else who didn’t either hitch a ride home on the wave of fame (the O6) or sneak back on their own accord (Ben). Because not for a minute do I think Jin is dead. He, along with most of the rest of the 815'ers that are not the "O6", are still on the island. Weather Sun or even Hurley know this I'm still not sure. Hurley knows some and probably more so than Sun. Not sure if anyone knows everything. At least we can agree on one thing, we sure a shit don't know everything, yet. But a little side mystery popped up when Hurley asked Sun if ‘anyone else was coming’. When she replied no, he said ‘gooood’, as if relieved. Was he hoping not to see Jack, Kate, Sayid, etc? Or was he hoping not to see the ghost(s) of the other people left behind, the way he saw Charlie.

Course Correction

Okay, theory time. So I don’t believe Ben staged the plane crash, but then again, I don’t think Widmore did it either. And I’m pretty sure Oceanic Airlines can get no good press out of gruesome footage of a body-filled wreckage. So just who DID stage the crash of flight 815?

Answer: No one. The plane really did crash.

This is hard to grasp at first, but the more LOST plays out the more sense it seems to make. I think most of us agree the plane was brought to the island for its own purposes - whatever they might be. On the island virtually anything goes, which is why so many necessary people survived the crash. This is the magic of LOST. But back in the real world, if we believe in the path of fate, the plane was supposed to crash. The people on board were supposed to die. That event played out, as a matter of the universe course-correcting itself, with the plane even sinking to the bottom of the ocean in the same three parts it broke into when it was torn apart in the air. In that one split second the plane existed in both universes: both the LOST universe, and the normal one. On island, everyone is given a tabula rasa, or clean slate. See you in another life – and it truly is another life. The island and its inhabitants have their play lists and go through their motions, with the ‘surviving’ members of flight 815 looking on incredulously and playing their parts. Meanwhile, off-island, certain things that were supposed to happen cannot now happen… because the elements necessary to course correction are no longer in that universe. Let’s take Ms. Hawking’s man with the red shoe, for example. If you pushed him out of the way of his construction death, the universe would find a way to kill him tomorrow as a matter of course correction. But if he were suddenly gone from the universe tomorrow – the way flight 815 vanished – the universe would be screwed out of doing that. The wreckage exists in the normal world, but it also exists scattered across the beach on LOST island. There’s no way I believe that anyone - Widmore, Ben, Bill Gates, The Wizard of Oz, or Bob the Builder with a giant Australia-sized crane actually went through the trouble of painstakingly recreating that crash site. That IS the crash site, because the plane actually crashed. And I’ll bet one day we’ll hear the black box recording to prove it. When Frank Lapidus is looking at the decaying body of the ring-less pilot on the news, is he really looking at a universally-course corrected version of himself in the cockpit of that plane? Because according to fate, he was supposed to be piloting flight 815. According to fate, he’s already dead. Ohhhh…… shit my head hurts now.

Grave Matters

This story, unexpectedly, dealt with resolving Sun's sin against her husband — her infidelity with Jae — yet also completed Jin's redemptive reconstruction into a husband worthy of his wife's faithfulness. Recognizing his own moral failure during his fishing-boat heart-to-heart with Bernard (a kinda corny but altogether effective scene), the former underworld strongman was able to forgive Sun and recognize his role in pushing her away. But the beautiful moment came when he said he would follow her to Locke's camp — this, from the man who just a couple months ago, in Lost time, demanded his wife obediently trot after him. Well played by Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim, this was Jin and Sun's finest hour since season 1.

Do we really have to have the big fight over the flash forward/flashback story? We are aren't we? ''Ji-Yeon'' seemed to contain a shared flash-forward that seemed to reveal that both Jin and Sun had made it off the Island. More, it appeared to tell the story of the birth of their child, a daughter named Ji-Yeon (which means either ''delay'' or ''flower of wisdom''), and how Jin missed the blessed event because of a comic episode involving his frustrated quest to buy a giant stuffed panda. But then the show pulled the rug on us. Hard. Lost had given us an episode with both a flashback (that panda business was part of an errand Jin was running for his mobster boss, Sun's father, Mr. Paik) and a flash-forward (we learned that Sun, a member of the Oceanic 6, got off the Island in time to successfully duck its anti-pregnant-lady curse and give birth). Jin's flashback served as a touchstone that reminded him (or just us) of the morally flimsy man he used to be. He needed to feel that anew — and we needed to see that again — in order for him to be able to (very quickly) reach reconciliation with his wife in the Island present.

In the last scene, we saw Hurley travel to Seoul and join Sun in visiting Jin's grave and introducing Ji-Yeon to her father, at least in spirit. The ending to Ji Yeon was nowhere near as straightforward as it might have initially appeared. One element of this story is certain: Jin is somewhere far apart from Sun in her flash forward. Now, the heavily debated issue will become much like the question Matthew Abbadon once posed to Hurley: is Jin still alive? The episode leaves open two perfectly valid interpretations for these events. Sun still wears her wedding ring, and she desperately tried to stop the doctors from removing it. The pain of childbirth put her into a state of emotional distress, in which she began calling out for her lost husband, even though she knew his presence was impossible. At the end of the episode, Sun speaks to the stone there as if it were Jin: "I wish you could’ve been there. I miss you so much". The memorial date of Jin’s death as September 22, 2004, the same day of the 815 plane crash, which indicates that Jin is not buried in the cemetery. All of these facts are worth noting, but none of them offer any definitive proof one way or another.

A couple of possibilities:

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

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

This development creates a unique new situation for Jin’s character in future episodes. One of the most common complaints against the introduction of flash-forwards has been that knowledge of future outcomes removes much of the show’s dramatic tension. In Jin’s case, though, the flash-forward now creates the exact opposite effect. Jin now exists on the show in an uncertain state between life and death. Somewhere in Korea, there is a tombstone with Jin’s name on it. Watching Jin on the island again will feel similar to seeing a ghost. In many ways, the viewer now experiences the same predicament in which Desmond found himself during Season Three. We suspect that something horrible will happen to Jin, but we do not know exactly when or exactly how this situation will play out. To an even greater extent than Desmond, though, the audience is now completely powerless to prevent this future. Like so many other unanswered questions on Lost, the show probably will not reveal the literal answer to this episode's central question for a significant period of time. We do not know whether Jin’s body will be physically alive by the time of Sun's flash forward in 2005. Even so, the episode as a whole presents several other possible conceptions of Jin's life to consider. On the island, Jin promised Sun: "I’ll do everything it takes to protect you and the baby. And you will never lose me." Has Jin lived up to those promises? Even though Jin and Sun are hopelessly separated, in what sense can we say that Jin is still alive in the world? The answer to this question depends on the ultimate meaning of what constitutes Jin’s life.

BERNARD: It’s all about karma, Jin. You know karma? You make bad choices, bad things happen to you. You make good choices, then good … [Jin catches a fish.] Wow! Look, now you see. Now that’s karma. We must be the good guys, huh?

I can't finish the Jin/Sun story rehash without bringing up Juliette spilling the beans about Sun's affair to Jin in order to prevent them from skipping off to Locke's camp. My jaw hit the floor. The balls on Juliet! That was ice cold and awesome!

Why did Regina kill herself?

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

Hey — don't I know you from someplace? Oh, yeah! You're the guy who sold out my friends and killed those two Tailie girls just to get your weirdo psychic son back!

I loved this scene. Doc Freighter was showing Sayid and Desmond to their bug-infested quarters when he summoned freighter janitor Kevin Johnson to scrub that brain paint off the wall. (Shades of Radzinsky, Kelvin's former partner in the Hatch and originator of the blast-door map, who blew his brains out and left some stain on the Swan's ceiling.) Pushing his mop bucket down the hall, K.J. emerged from the shadows and revealed himself to be Michael, looking both meeker and buffer than we last saw him at the end of season 2, sailing away from the Island with Walt. He and Sayid shared a tense moment ("Please please please don't bust me!") For a few fateful days, Michael became a murderer and a traitor. Now he has spent weeks living a new life under an assumed name. The name Kevin Johnson serves not only as a plot necessity, but also as a symbol of his new life after the island. Desmond, who made the phrase "See you in another life" famous, actually regards the man in front of him as Kevin Johnson. Sayid might have taken his hand not only to conceal Michael’s secret, but perhaps also as a gesture of forgiveness and his acceptance of Kevin Johnson’s new life. (Sayid understands Michael's situation better than anyone. He himself once committed the same act: he betrayed his people, murdered an innocent Iraqi soldier, and wounded himself in order to free Nadia.) Perhaps the timing of Michael's murders marks the most significant difference between his story and the stories of all of Lost’s other murderers, such as Sayid. By habit, we tend to judge characters based on their actions in 2004, the ‘present’. Most of the other main characters completed the darkest chapters of their lives before the island, but Michael/Kevin currently remains in that horrible stage of his own journey. The audience can forgive 2004 Jin for the actions of 2000 Jin. Will we eventually be able to forgive Kevin Johnson for the actions of Michael Dawson?

The Oceanic 6 is set. Right? Right?

Sun's flash-forward fake-out seemed to close out the first act of Lost's future-time story line: identifying the members of the Oceanic 6, the celebrity miracle survivors of Oceanic 815. To recap, they are Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Aaron, and Sun. Now, I know what some of you are saying: Aaron can't be a member of the Oceanic 6 because he wasn't born prior to the crash and therefore was not technically an Oceanic 815 passenger. To which I say, Please. Don't be so literal. In the Lost world, the Oceanic 6 is clearly a media-coined term, pinned on these six souls by some clever headline writer or newscaster. So let's call it, The Oceanic 6 is settled. Now, let's move on to the next act of their story, which I'm betting will cover two big points: the backstory behind Jack's downward spiral into boozy, grizzly-bearded, we-gotta-go-back-to-the-Island mania, and more context for Ben and Sayid's secret war with their list of mysterious off-Island foes.

Life After Death

Throughout Jin's storyline, this episode presented a series of clues to indicate that his scenes were flashbacks. The camera calls attention to Jin's outdated cellular phone, and the store clerk refers to the Year of the Dragon (2000 on Chinese calendars). The chronology was jumbled further, in such a way that the audience sees Jin rushing to the hospital before the scene in which Sun tries to notify him. Sun’s flashes even included a brief glimpse of Nikki from Exposé, as a hint that a similar surprise ending might be in store. The most revealing clue of all though should have Jin’s behavior. Jin remarks that he has become a much different man on the island than he once was before it. The 2004 Jin is a thoughtful and devoted husband, while the 2000 Jin is a cold-hearted man driven by ambition. His flashbacks highlighted not his need to be with his wife, but his need to acquire a material object, the stuffed panda. Jin explains that the panda is not a sign of his affection for Sun, but "a symbol of Mr. Paik's eagerness to do business in the great country of China". Along his way towards completing this service to the Paik empire, Jin bribes, intimidates, threatens to kill a man, and he even flirts with a nurse afterward. Regardless of these differences, Daniel Dae Kim somehow succeeded in his portrayal of these two different personalities, while he still maintained the necessary illusion of playing the same character throughout.

This ending was one even I didn't see coming. The Lost "powers that be" are getting perfect at the misdirection play.

The "Other" Woman or The Other Woman

While every episode can't rise to the level of The Constant, there's almost always something fun about every episode of Lost. First and foremost I feel that we have an episode here where the dialogue is more important than the action or lack thereof in this case. "It's very stressful being an other." was a great line. When Ben spouted "See you guys at dinner." I laughed out loud. And, "This didn't have a number on it did it?" was when I pissed my pants! But who exactly are we supposed to believe is the other woman here? Harper could be the other woman, I'm guessing they meant Juliette. Thinking about it further, hell, Ben could be the other woman for all we know. Did you see the way he sauntered up the hill and tended to the ham? Sashay, Shantee! But it doesn't really matter anyway. The biggest breakthrough for Ben was the way he started to come clean with Locke. I guess you can say he only did it as a way of getting out of captivity. That very aspect seemed to make his words all the more genuine, he’d wasted enough time in his cell, had pondered his next move, and had decided that giving Locke some answers was a lot more productive than the continued mind games.



It was pretty obvious that rain-slicked Harper was just another manifestation of the Smoke Monster. Black, wet, accompanied by whispers… even its goal seemed to coincide with that of tall island Walt: to violently stop whatever mission the freighter crew was attempting to accomplish. We saw it scan Eko and appear as Yemi, and since we know Juliet has encountered it at least once it’s not that big a stretch to say it probably obtained some of her memories too. When Juliet points out that Harper couldn’t possibly be following a captive Ben’s orders, BSM (black smoke monster) Harper tells her that Ben is "exactly where he wants to be". This part is believable. Ben’s been a player since opening night, and he knows where and when all the curtain calls are. But is drippy wet Harper truly relaying orders directly from Ben? Maybe not. I’ve long thought there was more than one force on the island: one associated with Jacob, and one associated with the BSM, the whispers, and the rain. I’m not sure they’re entirely opposing sides, but I’m not sure they have the exact same agenda either. In fact, I’d wager they don’t. I’ll even go one step further and theorize the BSM as a ‘purist’ renegade force sometimes acting counter productively to the island’s best interests, without really meaning to do so.

The Widmore reveal seemed a bit too obvious for LOST. Whichever side turns out to be white or black, it just seems a little straightforward. As Ben eagerly gave up his safe combination the magic box came to mind – the box that contains whatever it is you imagine being in there. It sure was convenient that Ben had an incriminating tape and a neatly organized file – and that’s it – in that safe (box). Just as it seemed convenient Ben came up with a tape of Juliet’s niece on a swing-set when he needed to persuade her to stay, or came up with a tape of the Red Sox to convince Jack to do his operation. For a long time now, LOST has been all about free will. Ben could’ve forced Jack to operate, but told him directly that he needed him to want to do it. He needed this because it was the only possible way the operation would succeed. Likewise Ben could’ve forced Juliet to stay on the island, but for her work to succeed she had to be a willing inhabitant. Notice that she made progress while she was happy to be there, but the minute she was being kept against her will everything she tried failed to save her patients from death .Along this same vein, Ben needs Locke to believe that Widmore is the enemy (whether he is or not) to accomplish his next goal. The only way to do this is by physically showing him, because as Locke points out several times "The problem Ben, is that I don’t believe you". Although Locke is a man of faith, Ben’s track record is way too spotty. Locke needs a visual. Ben provides. Or does the magic box provide him, once again, exactly what is needed – the same way a spinal surgeon fell from the sky?

Does Miles still have that damn hand grenade in his mouth? An even better question: does Hurley ever miss? Horseshoes, H-O-R-S-E, ping-pong, the lottery… Hurley is going to be the pivotal character when everything goes down. When a crucial moment requires a golden touch, they’re definitely gonna want Hugo around. But back to the other woman, okay, so the episode wasn’t about Juliet. It wasn’t about the Other woman, or Goodwin, or the Dan / Charlotte mission impossible last second save-the-day countdown. This episode was all about Ben. For his whole life (or lives, depending upon how you look at things), Ben’s done the will of the island. He’s followed its orders and its rules – he’s protected it and sacrificed for it. He’s done everything a good son would do, and more. Somewhere along the line though, Ben began to covet. He wanted something of his own. One of the things Ben wanted was to rectify the fertility ‘problem’ of the island. The jury is still out regarding the source of this. There are lots of theories as to why children cannot be conceived and born on the island; some of them very complicated involving time and existence. Regardless, Juliet was brought to the island for a specific purpose: Ben’s purpose. When Ben says "You are mine" he doesn’t necessarily mean it in a romantic sense. While that might arguably be a part of it, Ben’s shiny new toy was supposed to settle in and solve that nagging fertility problem. Instead, Juliet is distracted by thoughts of home and her terminally ill sister. With a little help from Mikhail, this is a problem Ben can handle. But then Juliet is distracted by something else: naked Goodwin. And this is something Ben cannot compete with. By sending Goodwin off to die, Ben is knowingly sacrificing one of his best men. The outcome isn’t in the best interests of the island, yet he does it anyway. Even the Others were pissed off last season about the fertility project, calling it a ‘waste of time’. Ben’s feeble attempts at wooing Juliet with Opera CD’s and ham don’t work, because the necessary social skills are perhaps the only talents Ben couldn’t obtain while growing up on the island. Ben fumbles around miserably, even comically in this area. Now think about the only other time in his life Ben tried to do something just for himself – Alex. Trying to be the father he never had, Ben seized and raised Alex as his own… only to have that come back and bite him in the ass too. Coveting certain things for himself is Ben’s one fatal flaw: and as these trains derail they appear to wreck his well-laid plans. Jacob abandons him, his people leave him – Ben’s lost sight of the island’s agenda. Only by putting himself back on that path can he gain favor again.

But Ben, as usual, is the real enigma of the episode. Here's something to think about—does Ben have Desmond-like abilities to peek into the future? Ben set Goodwin up when he sent him after the tail section of Flight 815, expecting him not to make it back and thus clearing his path to Juliet. Ben also tells Locke that he knows Locke's people will be rising up against him, especially when they find out Locke has no plan. When Ben tells Locke "If my people still wanted me, John, they would have stormed this camp long ago," he already knows better since he already has Harper out working for him. In all of these cases, Ben seems to be operating with some sort of foreknowledge. But like Desmond, this isn't complete foreknowledge; he didn't foresee Goodwin getting in his way to Juliet before it was already underway. Ben also dropped some theory-bait over his dinner-entrapment with Juliet when Juliet says Zack and Emma, the two surviving Tailie children, are asking about their mother in Los Angeles. Ben just says "They'll stop asking in time. They're on the list, Juliet. Who are we to question who's on the list and who's not?" Hold it—didn't Ben tell Goodwin and Ethan to make the lists to begin with and bring the lists to him? Just who is making the decisions here?

About the Tempest: One of the joys of Shakespeare is how flexibly it lends itself to all kinds of adventurous stagings. The plays have been staged and rewritten as everything from Japanese kabuki to vintage 1950's Science Fiction. So why not a magical tropical island? In fact, there's no need to improvise. Shakespeare already wrote a play quite like this! About a place where "the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs," ...or as we call them - whispers. A place inhabited by "all spirits, and/ are melted into air, into thin air" who can disguise themselves as things like harpies... or in this case a spurned wife ("hostile, even for a therapist") named Harper. "O! I have suffer'd / With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, / Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, / Dash'd all to pieces" It's impossible to know for sure how far Ben's powers reach. He shares many traits of Prospero, the Duke turned Magician in Tempest. He's got a "daughter", of sorts. But as odd as Ben is he can never seem to escape the utter ordinariness that hangs around him like his baggy butt pants. He's capable of astonishing things, but Magic doesn't seem to be one of his powers. Great actors have argued for years over whether Prospero or Caliban is the showier role in Tempest. So given that Michael Emerson is a Wizard of an actor, maybe it was decided to create a hybrid of the two for him to play. Because - like Caliban - Ben is something of a motherless monster. As well as, currently, a prisoner. And - like Caliban - he's a guy with a lot of problems when it comes to the ladies. Like David, in his quest to illicitly possess Bathsheba, he sent her lover into battle and a sure death. Leaving Juliet more alone than ever before. But it may just be that it was Juliet's prayer that was answered by the plane crash that brought her the shipwrecked traveler she has fallen in love with.

I have to give credit where credit is due, hard as it may be sometimes. The scene between Jack and Juliet was genuinely romantic and touching. Have we ever seen Jack be so tender? Juliet laid her feelings on the line. Jack was so touched he actually manned up and kissed her all by himself! We've never seen him do that before! "I am a fool / To weep at what I am glad of." It was as if they were clinging to each other and this fleeting moment of peace in the eye of the storm. They know as well as we do that it will not last long. Of course this sweet romantic interlude was just a ripple in the tempest of the madly thrashing story. We know that "not Penny's boat" does belong to Penny's father. (At least I think we know that.) And we know that Widmore's minions know enough about the Island to understand how to disable its defenses. The coast is clear now for the next wave of their invasion.

Much like Locke, Juliet ranks as one of the strongest-willed characters on the show, even though she continues to show a fatal weakness for the power of Ben. Juliet has tried to remove Ben from her life many times in the past, both by escape attempts and by an attempt on his life. Each time, she has failed. She now adopts a defeatist attitude, by stating with feeble certainty that "Ben is going to win" this war. Sayid’s flash-forward in The Economist guarantees that Ben will remain an integral player in the story for the foreseeable future. Perhaps Ben eventually will cede his power willingly, much like Prospero. I don't expect that Ben will ever love anything enough to set it free. I would expect that Ben’s fate on Lost will more closely parallel the fate of any other despot who violates the tenets of the social contract. In Juliet’s first ever scene on Lost, she expressed her identification with Stephen King’s Carrie, a story of an abused girl’s struggle to break free and exact revenge on her tormentors. Early in the episode, Harper explained to Juliet exactly how she could end all of her problems: "by pointing the gun and pulling the trigger". Of course, she needs to stop taking orders from Ben and take matters into her own hands. After watching "The Other Woman", I can think of no more fitting end to his reign than for Juliet Burke to commit an ‘act of free will,’ and overthrow the island’s cruel tyrant once and for all. Of course I could just be full of shit.

The Constant

In a romantically moving episode, Desmond's 1996 consciousness takes over his mind now, but his connection with Penelope saves him. Immediately after its airing, audiences regarded "The Constant" among the greatest Lost episodes of all time. Although this overwhelmingly positive reaction might seem a bit extreme, there are many strong reasons to support such a claim: this episode not only presented a series of mind-blowing scenes one after another, but also built towards a climax that proved to be as emotionally touching as any other moment of the series. Perhaps the episode’s greatest strength, though, is the way in which it casts every other Lost episode, both past and future, in a completely different light.


It’s hard to notice stuff when your jaw’s lying on the floor, but this episode was really that good. Watching Desmond’s consciousness catapult back and forth across eight years of his life should’ve been confusing… it should’ve been way too crazy to follow, way too far out to make much sense to people. Yet when you think about it, the writers of LOST have been gently herding ("Shepharding"?) us along, building us up, preparing us for this exact moment for over three years now. The event horizon of clouds surrounding the island obscured the sun and all other points of reference, and the helicopter seemingly became one with the electromagnetic storm. Sayid notes that: "We took off at dusk and landed in the middle of the day". Relativity can explain the difference in two measurements of time, if the helicopter somehow traveled a much greater distance, and at a much greater velocity, than it appeared to travel. Charlie's question, "Guys, where are we?" now seems as significant as ever. Looks like 31 minutes is out the window here. When Sayid finally does get the chance to speak with Jack, they’re speaking live but about a day apart (island time). It seems the definitive answer is that time does move slower on the island than in the real world. But is there a day-to-day (relative) difference? In either event, Desmond goes Marty McFly, and that’s the real story. This time we get to see a reverse trip as a very confused past Desmond is launched into his future situation. The "only the consciousness goes" part was extremely clever, but even more revealing. If examined closely and open-minded, this one phenomenon can decode almost every inexplicable part of the show. More on that in a minute. Desmond isn't the only one trapped in a time fart. Daniel himself is skipping around, as foreshadowed by Doc Ray’s exclamation that "Faraday can’t even help himself!" Later on we learn that excessive radiation (or electromagnetism, how convenient) lends to the problem, of which zap-happy Daniel has no shortage. Eventually we see that he’s even got an entry in his own log referring to Desmond as his constant, which means that up until he came to the island he was still searching for that one thing or person (wonder where he got that idea from?) to ground him. He found that thing upon meeting Desmond the morning the chopper took off, and was pretty sure that would be the end of his ‘problem’… but upon playing cards with Charlotte that night he still hadn’t made any progress. Perhaps the act of helping Desmond reach his own constant, Penny, will finally ‘unstick’ Danny once and for all. Also skipping through his lifetime is Mikowski, who’s virtually an expert by the time they find him. I found his "I was just on a Ferris wheel" line interesting, because like everything else in LOST a Ferris wheel goes round and round and always comes full circle. You know who else got a nasty case of the jump-through-life crazies? Rousseau’s entire crew. This could very well be the ‘sickness’ she referred to so early on in season one. Look at how bat-shit nuts Desmond went in the chopper – now imagine Danielle’s entire crew acting like that while she’s trying to "shhh!" them as the smoke monster stalks the jungle and the Others pick off whomever they feel are on Santa’s list. Kinda puts a new spin on that whole scenario.

While we’re at it, let’s think back to Juliet’s arrival by sub. Was it coincidence they knocked her out for the trip through the time barrier? Or by relieving her of her consciousness as she passed through did they save her from any of Daniel’s so called ‘side effects’? As Ethan said, it’s a hell of a ride. But hey, let’s lock a really misshapen piece of the puzzle into place: Hurley’s friend Leonard. Could it be that he time-skipped his way into the mental institution after being stationed a little too close to the island? Imagine him living pieces of his life over and over again, in loops that get geometrically (Daniel’s wording, not mine) smaller. Now picture those loops getting smaller and smaller… until all that’s left is a tiny 10 or 15-second flash of time he has to relive over and over again: the radio transmission. The numbers. 4,8,15,16,23,42… hiccup!... 4,8,15,16,23,42.

Tearing a single page out of Dan’s book we now see mention of three events: A, B, and C. Anyone willing to bet that two of those events pertain to both times Desmond failed to push the button; once at the crash of 815, and once when he turned the fail safe key. The third event we don’t know about or it hasn’t happened yet (the end event?). Perhaps each event triggered an alternate timeline, and is responsible for the ‘rebirth’ of everyone involved (physical and spiritual healing included). This is hinted at multiple times throughout the show with "See you in another life". But now, when we begin to factor the time hiccups into the equation, we’re not only looking at concurrent time lines. We must now also consider time lines where someone’s consciousness (and only their consciousness – that part’s important) is derived from their past or even their future. From the beginning, the producers have hinted that where flight 815 crashed wasn’t nearly as important as when it crashed.

Taking this into consideration, what if the plane crashed before September 22Nd 2004? We’ve seen time differentials of 31 seconds and even a whole day now – who’s to say it couldn’t span a week or more? As we saw with Desmond, the consciousness is transferred but the body stays the same. So what if (and get ready to be totally creeped out here…) what if the plane crashed during a period in time when Christian Shephard was still alive? What if the only place his consciousness had to go was into his current body, tucked neatly away in the coffin that turned up empty on impact? Could this explain why Jack kept seeing him? Could this explain why Jacob looked like him for that brief instant?

"I guess you guys weren't ready for that but your kids are gonna love it."

''Unstuck in time'' - That phrase comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, in which Billy Pilgrim finds himself toggling between time periods of his life, including a trip to an alien planet. In the process, Pilgrim nearly loses his mind. Many have conjectured, and will continue to conjecture, that time itself somehow moves differently on the island than in the rest of the world. The Constant should put these theories on hold. The calendar on the Kahana freighter coincides with the amount of time that should have passed since the plane crash. Penelope’s reference to her three years of searching also coincides with the amount of time that should have elapsed since Desmond was lost at sea. The opening scene of this episode represents the first instance in which the camera shows a character's travel to or from the island. Neither Juliet nor Desmond was conscious during their 'intense' journeys to the island. Naomi described that land suddenly appeared 'out of nowhere' as she was searching over the middle of the ocean. Looking back at the Pilot episode, did a similar experience occur in the crash of Oceanic 815, a sudden jump through space, in which time advanced from evening to morning? The idea that Richard Alpert’s apparent lack of aging might be related to his travel on and off the island. Suppose that Richard Alpert has been moving back and forth from the island with great frequency, and each time he traveled at speeds approaching the speed of light. Whenever he made such a journey, days became mere minutes, and eventually decades of time became mere months.

Most episodes of Lost explore the conflicts that speak to the very core issues of the human experience: good and evil, past and present, present and future, science and faith, fate and free will, life and death. Lost suggests that every one of these dichotomies might be a false one, and instead only a matter of perspective. Consider the title of the most recent episode. Daniel Faraday borrows the term ‘constant’ from the language of the mathematics: "All this … this is all variables. It’s a random scale. Every equation needs stability, something known." As Daniel explains this concept to Desmond, he instantly interprets it on his own terms, in the language of love: "This constant … can it be a person?" Only the combined efforts of Daniel’s head and Desmond’s heart (as well as Daniel’s heart and Desmond’s mind) could find salvation from this predicament. The unlucky lab rat Eloise lacked either one of these human characteristics, so she could not survive the journey. Our short-lived newcomer George Minkowski seemed to possess enough mental faculties to understand what was happening to him, but he could not find the emotional grounding necessary to get back to reality. The Constant not only appeals equally to the hearts and minds of its audience, but the story also suggests that those two forces (much like space and time) cannot exist independently from each other.

Too bad this episode didn't air on Valentine's Day like the one where Sayid ... uh, ... kills his girlfriend did, huh? Anyway, finally, we get to the climactic scene where Desmond made the call to Penny in real-time. Was anyone besides me yelling when the phone kept ringing and ringing, "WHY THE HELL ISN'T SHE ANSWERING?!?!" But instead of a morbid ending, we received confirmation that Desmond has been "cured," as he once again recognized Sayid.

SAYID: I'm sorry, the power source went dead, that's all we have.

DESMOND: Thank you, Sayid. It was enough.

SAYID: Are you alright now?

DESMOND: Aye. I'm perfect.

Damn straight, you're perfect, brotha!

You know, we depend on the clocks on our walls. We use them to tell us what time to get up and when to go to work and when to get to the meeting and when to go to bed and when to get up again. We rely on it to keep the continuous loop of our daily lives from unspooling. It's a constant in our lives, a reference point. But how constant is it, really?

"People think of time as a sort of straight line, but when you look at it from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, it's more of a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff." - Dr. Who

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey...stuff. That sounds like a good description of how Desmond felt in this episode.

TIIII-II-II-IME IS ON MY SIDE, YES IT IS