Lost, "The Incident": The men behind the curtain

Spoilers for the "Lost" season finale coming up just as soon as I sign for a Fruit Roll-Up...

"They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same." -Man #2
"It only ends once. Anything that happens before that, it's just progress." -Jacob

"We traveled back 30 years in time, and you're still trying to find ways to shoot each other." -Rose

"What's done is done." -Sawyer
"It doesn't have to be that way." -Jack

In the days leading up to the airing of "The Incident," Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been trying to manage fan expectations. On the latest installment of their always-hilarious podcast(*), they even compared the ending to the final shot of season one's "Exodus," when the camera zoomed down the broken ladder of the hatch and we realized the show had spent months building up expectations for something they had no intention of showing us until the next season.

(*) Seriously, in some ways, I think those two are wasted on a sci-fi drama like "Lost." Just listen to their riff about how, in retrospect, they should have conceived of Jacob as a 60-foot-tall man made entirely of flame, who would inspire Locke to take one look at him and demand that someone bring him a bucket, and you know that they really should be working as a comedy team at nightclubs in the Catskills. (Are there still nightclubs in the Catskills?)

And I can see why they might have felt that way, and not just because "The Incident" featured several shots that were identical to that closing image of "Exodus," as the drill shaft at the Swan site looks to be the exact place where the ladder will sit 30 years later. After all of this debate about whether the past can be changed or is set in stone, all the talk of Jughead and The Incident -- and whether Jack and company were going to cause it or prevent it -- for them to end the season on a flash of white light, with no sign of what Jughead's explosion accomplished, feels, structurally, very much like the end of season one: a lot of teasing for an answer that's going to wait for months (and many more months than between seasons one and two, at that).

And you know what? I. Do. Not. Care.

Because that? That was so exciting, so mythology-intensive, so loaded with great performances and great character notes, so all-around kick-ass, that I feel more than satisfied.

And, in a way that I didn't think was possible at the end of season one, or for pretty much all of seasons two and three, I trust these guys now. Yes, ending "Exodus" that way was a tactical error given all the build-up (in retrospect, the very least they should have done was zoomed down to show a shadowy figure in a Dharma jumpsuit holding an assault rifle), but the rest of "Exodus" was wonderful, and the eventual payoff with Desmond was worth it in the end. Whatever missteps the show has made, some caused by external forces, some not, it's been so consistently assured and entertaining for these past two seasons that I feel confident Cuselof really do know what they're doing here -- that, whether the grand plan was really sketched out from the beginning, or made up at a later date, it's mostly going to work out as it should in the final season, and if I have to show a little patience to find out exactly what happened when Juliet made Jughead's core go kablooey, well... I think I can handle that now. Hell, they even had a plan all along with Rose and Bernard, leading to one of the best, most moving scenes of the finale.

Now, I have one significant complaint about "The Incident," and I want to get it out of the way fast so we can get to analyzing all that we learned: the minute Jack admitted to Sawyer that he was going forward with this insane plan because of Kate -- "I had her. I had her, and I lost her." -- I had to really, really resist the urge to flick some nitroglycerin pellets at the TV screen.

And it's not that I necessarily think it was out of character for Jack to do this. He's just that much of a stubborn, tunnel-visioned imbecile. It's that I had hoped that by now he had somehow grown out of it -- that his time on the mainland, and the realization that they needed to go back, really had cured him of some of his more reckless, headstrong ways, and his weird fixation on Kate was part of that. I was relieved when it turned out that Kate was going back to the island for selfless, non-Jack-related reasons, and hoped that maybe we were done with that half of the quadrangle, but alas... nope.

If Kate were a more interesting character, and/or if Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lily had an iota of the chemistry that Lily has with Josh Holloway (or, for that matter, that Holloway has with Elizabeth Mitchell), maybe I could buy into the idea that Jack would be willing to explode a hydrogen bomb to potentially recreate their love. But she's not, and they don't, and so it just made a good chunk of the 1977 portion of the second hour seem much sillier than it should have. If Jack were being driven by his messiah complex -- if giving him and Kate another shot was just one on an incredibly long list of things he could fix if Faraday's theory was correct (most of the other items being all the Oceanic survivors who died on his watch) -- I could have gone with it. But to turn the whole thing into the most explosive, dangerous chapter of the quadrangle story was a bad idea.

And it irked me that Juliet -- who's always been much more rational, and more empathetic, than Jack -- would flip-flop and decide to go along with this lunatic plan because she got her own heart broken due to an ill-timed glance at Sawyer glancing at Kate just as Bernard was giving an eloquent speech about the importance of being with the one you love until the end. They redeemed that part towards the end just because Mitchell and Holloway were so great and so raw as Sawyer tried to keep Juliet from being sucked down the pit, only for Juliet to let go to save the man she realized did love her as much as she wanted him to. But for a while there, I was growing to dislike Juliet almost as much as I usually hate Jack.

Okay, now that out of the way, where to begin? May as well begin at the beginning, in which we meet... Jacob, and his counterpart to be named later. These two have been on the island even longer than Richard (who I'm guessing was on the Black Rock, which I'm guessing was the boat Jacob eyed off the shore), locked in some kind of unbreakable cycle of violence, and one with specific rules that aren't supposed to be broken. (In that way, it sounds a lot like the conflict between Ben and Widmore.) They bring different people to the island as pawns in whatever this game is, and no matter who the pawns are and how they try to beat the board, it all ends up in disaster, only to begin again...

... until, that is, Man #2 appears to have found that loophole he's been talking about forever, and has somehow turned himself into a perfect copy of John Locke, at the same time that the real Locke's corpse remains very dead, and in the box that Ilana and Bram have been toting from Alcatraz to the main island. And however that allows him to violate the rules of the game, it's now allowed him to talk Ben into repeatedly stabbing Jacob in his home at the base of the four-toed foot.

(And let's pause a moment to reflect on the life and death of John Locke, one of the series' most important and compelling characters. It looks like dead really is dead, and while Cuselof have, like Man #2, come up with a workaround that allows them to keep the great Terry O'Quinn employed, I do feel sad that he apparently won't get to play Locke anymore, and that the serene, fulfilled Locke of recent episodes was an impostor. He really did die the pathetic, miserable death that Ben gave him. Dammit.)

It was interesting to watch Jacob's past interactions with our surviving Oceanic characters, and to see exactly what he did and said to nudge them along the path that would take them to his island. He gives young James Ford the pen to keep writing the letter to Anthony Cooper, keeps Sayid from being run over by the same driver who kills Nadia, assures Locke that everything will be okay after Cooper throws him out the window, asks Jin and Sun to remember their love and try to stay together (which will lead Sun to get on the plane in Sydney) and explicitly asks Hurley to go back to the island (with the still-unexplained guitar case) after Ben's lawyers get him out of prison.

But I have to admit to being puzzled about the cause-and-effect with Kate and Jack. I suppose he keeps Kate out of trouble with the law at a young age, which could put her in a position to go fugitive later on, but all he does with Jack is to put Jack's recent surgical misadventure into a vending machine metaphor (noting that the stuck Apollo bar "just needed a push," like Jack needed from Christian). I'm open to interpretations on either or both of these.

Now, we don't know what Jacob's game is truly about, nor what happens when Jughead goes off, but I suppose now is a good time to do a status check on our remaining players:

Juliet: Trapped under debris at the bottom of what will one day be The Swan, almost certainly dead unless Faraday was right about the explosion changing the timeline.

Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Hurley, Jin and Sayid: At Ground Zero for Jughead's explosion (along with Radzinsky and Pierre Chang, who suffers the injury that will presumably lead to the amputation of his arm), with Sayid bleeding to death after being gutshot by Roger Linus.

Rose, Bernard, and Vincent: Laying low, living off the land and what they can scrounge from Dharma, enjoying retirement and generally being awesome.

John Locke: Dead, and/or cloned, and/or resurrected, and/or possessed by Man #2.

Ben: Committing another act of patricide, trying to stab to death a father figure who had so little apparent use for him that he never intentionally showed his face to Ben until now.

Sun, Lapidus, Alpert, Ilana, Bram and the Others: Hanging outside the statue, gawking at Locke's corpse.

Claire and Christian: Missing in action, and possibly not as connected to Jacob as we thought. (The way Ilana says "someone else has been using" the cabin implies a trespasser of some kind.)

Desmond, Penny, and baby Charlie: Still in Los Angeles, but presumably playing a major role in the final season, with or without Eloise Hawking.

Nicki and Paolo: Still dead, thank God.

There was so much going on in this finale, and I'm so eager to get this done so you can start talking and I can go to bed, that I'm going to go straight to the bullet points:

• I'm both too tired and too ignorant on the subjects of Egyptian mythology, the Spanish language and the works of Flannery O'Connor, so I leave it to you to analyze what the statue's face means (because that sure as heck wasn't Anubis), what Richard (aka Ricardos) says to Ilana, and whether there's any deeper meaning to Jacob reading "Everything That Rises Must Converge" as he waits for Cooper to throw Locke out the window.

• Jeff Fahey hasn't had a whole lot to do this season, but he's always wonderful, as exemplified here by his delivery of "Terrific" after Lapidus got a look at Locke's body.

• Man #2 was played by Titus Welliver, who's one of a legion of "Deadwood" alums to appear on "Lost" (also including Kim Dickens, Robin Weigert, William Sanderson and Paula Malcomson). Frankly, I'm going to be disappointed if the ubiquitous Garrett Dillahunt doesn't manage to put in an appearance before the end.

• Jacob, meanwhile, was played by Mark Pellegrino, whom you might know as Rita's sleazy ex-husband Paul on "Dexter," or as the guy in "The Big Lebowski" who peed on The Dude's rug -- which is a shame, as it really tied the room together.

• Kudos to the casting people for finding the actress who played young Kate. You didn't even need to see the kid playing the young MacKenzie Astin holding the toy airplane to realize who we were looking at.

• Though J.J. Abrams really hasn't had anything to do with the show since season one, Lindelof and Cuse still seem fond of the Todd Mulcahy scene from "Felicity," as Nadia became at least the third "Lost" character (after Michael and Juliet's ex-husband) to be abruptly hit by a car or bus.

• The Jack/Christian flashback, by the way, is the story he tells Kate in the pilot when she's stitching him up (a scene that they referenced themselves later in this episode).

• And in other continuity touches, Sun got to admire Aaron's cradle (which has held up remarkably well) and find Charlie's old Driveshaft ring.

• If Sayid's time on this earth isn't long, at least Naveen Andrews got to have some stellar moments in the finale, from the look of horror on Sayid's face as he watched Nadia die to the resignation, and even welcoming of death, as he bled out against the magic bus.

• I have a feeling we've also seen the last of Juliet. Why else would Cuselof have bothered to give her a flashback -- the only one in the episode to not feature a visit from Jacob -- if they weren't trying to give her some closure before writing her out?

• While this season closed off most of the temporal loops, we still need to see the other half of the scene where Sawyer and company were being shot at on the outrigger, and to find out why the beach looked so much worse than it did when Locke brought his group there in this episode.

• I like that Miles ordered Chang to get as far away as he could, just as hours earlier (from Chang's perspective) or decades earlier (from Miles'), Chang did the same for him and his mom.

For the last time this season -- and with a long wait until the final 17 episodes of this great series -- what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Follow the Leader": Paid the cost to be the boss

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I buy shares in Microsoft...

"I'm starting to think John Locke is going to be trouble." -Richard Alpert
"Why do you think I tried to kill him?" -Ben

Of the many recurring themes of "Lost," the question of what makes a good leader -- and how someone can be the perfect leader in one situation and a complete disaster in another -- has always been one of my favorites. It's fun to watch, and to debate -- I can go on for a few hours about all the ways in which Sayid was the perfect leader for nearly every situation of the first four seasons, not that anyone on the show was ever wise enough to notice -- and so an episode with a title like "Follow the Leader," with so much musing about who deserves to be in charge of different factions, was right up my alley.

Between 1977 and 2007, we have many past, present and future leaders coming into conflict with one another -- some on their way up the leadership track, some on their way back down -- with the one constant being immortal Richard Alpert.

We see in both eras that Richard's role is to be the "advisor," as Ben puts it, to whoever the island has chosen to lead the Others -- a coalition of Eloise and Widmore in 1977, Locke in the present -- and to aid them in carrying out their plans. It seems he has to listen to them, to go along with whatever they're doing, even if he disagrees with it, and even though he's older, wiser and more tightly-connected to the island than any of them. But we also see throughout the episode -- just as we did back when Richard was introduced back in season three, when he helped Locke to undermine Ben's leadership -- that he's not quite as subservient as he appears. He's not happy with Ellie's decision to follow Jack, nor with Locke's insistence on going to see Jacob -- and taking the rest of the Others with him -- and you can see in both eras that he's trying to figure out a way to follow the letter of whatever law keeps him from being the leader while ducking the spirit of it.

Sometime between now and the end of the series, we almost have to get a Richard flashback episode, one that likely goes back to the Black Rock era (as hinted at by the ship in a bottle gag at the top of the episode), if not all the way back to when the statue and the Temple were built. There's too much island mythology to unravel any other way in the limited time we have left, and as Ben notes to Sun, Richard's had this job "for a very, very long time." He's the man who's been witness to so many things that the show has only implied so far, and we have to find out what he knows to understand it all.

And among the first things we have to understand is who exactly Richard reports to: Jacob, or the island? Until this episode, I would have assumed the two entities were more or less the same. But Locke is getting his marching orders -- including instructions on how to orchestrate Richard's end of the compass scene from the season premiere -- from someone or something, and whatever that force is, it's telling him he needs to kill Jacob. Is it possible that Jacob -- and the people like Ben, and Widmore, and possibly Richard, who have claimed to follow him -- don't really have the island's best interest at heart at all? And if so, which side should we be rooting for? Jacob did, after all, ask Locke to help him back in "The Man Behind the Curtain," and in a tone that implied he was a prisoner of the cabin, if not the island itself. As with the Widmore/Ben feud, it's unclear who, if anyone, is the good guy in this particular conflict.

Back in the '70s, we have a variety of power struggles among different factions, just as the Oceanic 815 survivors were constantly bickering over who got to deliver the orders. Radzinsky stages a wartime coup of sorts among the Dharma Intiative, even as Dr. Chang (having meditated on Faraday's warning) is doing his best to get the women and children out alive. Sawyer's reign as an important man among both the Dharma group and the time-travelers comes to an end after he's caught by Radzinsky and Phil, and so he reverts back to his self-preservationist roots, trading a map to the Others in exchange for submarine passage for himself and his special lady Juliet. And Kate, who once would have followed Jack blindly into the gates of Hell, rebels against his attempt to follow through with Faraday's plan to explode Jughead in the Swan, preventing the Incident and all the deaths that followed.

It's that last conflict that's the heart of most of the 1977 scenes. Jack means well, but he's willfully operating with blinders on, as he so often does. He doesn't know exactly what Dan intended to do, nor how it's going to work, but he's so caught up in the idea of preventing the plane crash and all the bad things that happened that he's wiling to go forward with the insane idea of detonating a hydrogen bomb, without even having a quantum physicist's knowledge of how this is all supposed to work.

Kate, conversely, initially seems against Jack's plan for selfish reasons: sure, dozens upon dozens of other people (from the anonymous Socks to people she knew well like Boone and Shannon and Michael) might not have died, but Kate would still be a prisoner, and she'd never get to have all that fun, sexy love triangle time with Jack and Sawyer. As she puts it to Jack, "It was not all misery!"

But the more the episode went along, the more it seemed that Kate was the one thinking clearly. Jack doesn't know what he's doing, and is consumed with a Locke-like mania, predicated on the belief that he has some grand destiny to fulfill, and that faith is all it will take to make that happen. Locke acted that way, and people died -- and I suspect more of them will die in his crusade to take out Jacob -- and the same will very likely happen with Jack being this stubborn.

My best guess at this point, actually, is that Dan was right in the first place: whatever happened, happened, and every action the time-unstuck characters take will only ensure that history goes along the proper course. Maybe if Radzinsky weren't losing his mind about a possible attack by the Hostiles, or if Jack weren't attempting to assault the Swan with a freakin' hydrogen bomb, the Incident never would have happened. We've already seen Charlotte and Miles and their mothers evacuated from the island just as they remember -- with Miles finally coming to understand why his father was such an apparent bastard to him and his mother -- and that only happened because of the time travel. As Eloise told Desmond, the universe has a way of course-correcting, and I'm assuming the season ends with the Incident having taken place, followed by Jack, Sayid, Kate and company hurled back to the present, having accomplished nothing but ensuring the predetermined flow of history.

Now, to get there, a lot is going to have to happen, starting with the Dharma sub making a u-turn to deposit Sawyer, Juliet and Kate back onto Craphole Island.

In the end, the reign of LaFleur ended just as messily as every other leader's tenure on this island. (Maybe that's a part of being a leader of any island faction: with great power comes the inevitable beatdown. Sawyer's face looked an awful lot like Ben's by the end of the episode.) Even as Sawyer lost his Churchill-like wisdom and serenity, Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell continued to kill it in showing Sawyer and Juliet's deep love and trust of one another, in the Dharma security office, on the dock as they said goodbye (and, in Sawyer's case, "Good riddance") to the island, and on the sub as they pondered a free life in the real world of 1977. But on "Lost," happiness doesn't even last as long as a leader's time in office, and so of course Kate had to be dumped into the sub and shackled next to them. Awk-ward! Great looks on everyone's face, and lots of promise for next week's two-hour finale.

Some other thoughts on "Follow the Leader":

• Though we couldn't hear all of Widmore and Eloise's conversation, the snippets we did hear, and his pat of her belly, implies she's pregnant with Dan in 1977, which answers some of my chronology questions from last week (and means that Jeremy Davies was playing quite a bit younger -- and that the Dan that Desmond met in 1996 was only 18 or 19). I'm assuming that part of the fallout from the Incident will involve Eloise moving to the mainland to have and raise the son she knows she's destined to kill.

• Speaking of which, for the benefit of the people who don't read all of the comments, I want to again commend all the posters last week who suggested the reason for Dan's awful destiny was to put his journal in his mother's hands, so that Eloise would know most of what would happen for the next 30 years. This also explains why she told Penny last week that she no longer knew anything that was coming next. I'll still miss Jeremy Davies, who was incredible in his spotlight episodes this season, but I at least feel better that Dan didn't just die to close a chronal loop.

• While Radzinsky and Phil were slapping around Sawyer, all I could think of was why they didn't drag Sawyer out to see crazy Oldham from "He's Our You." I know Stu thought time was of the essence, but that seemed the easiest and most secure way to get a confession -- unless, of course, everyone was so spooked by what they thought was the failed interrogation of Sayid that they've dismissed the idea of Oldham's truth serum.

• Hurley, terrible liar. Doesn't know when he was supposed to be born, or who the president was, and assumed that the Korean War question was a trick of Chang's. Hilarious scene.

• Locke gets to kill another boar, and to return to Others camp with another corpse on his back.

• Regardless of what Richard is up to, what do you suppose Ben's game is? Is he really already disobeying the orders he got in "Dead Is Dead"? Or is he setting up Richard? Or just amusing himself while following orders? Either way, it's a lot of fun to watch Michael Emerson play a sidelined but still troublesome Ben, and it continues to be great to watch this serene, cocky Terry O'Quinn.

• For that matter, it was amusing as hell to see Richard and Ben so at a loss in the time travel scene. Nice to see the shoe on the other foot now and then.

• And speaking of the compass scene, we still don't know where the compass originated from (Richard gets it in 1954 from Locke, who then gets it from Richard in 2007 to give back to Richard in 1954), and we find out that Locke's instructions to bring back the entire Oceanic Six originated from Locke himself. Now, some of that also came from Ben and Ms. Hawking and Christian Shepard, but mostly it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• I know nearly every network show has had its budget trimmed some in this rough economy, so I'll give the show a pass for the cheesey-looking CGI on the submarine departure sequence, which managed to look worse than Lapidus landing the Ajira plane on the Alcatraz runway.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "The Variable": Destiny is a fickle bitch

Spoilers for the 100th episode of "Lost" coming up just as soon as I pack a suitcase...

"I tried to avoid telling you this. I didn't think I could change things. But maybe I can." -Daniel Faraday

We've all of us -- fans watching at home, characters living on Craphole Island, writers crafting it all in Los Angeles -- spent a lot of the last few months discussing the idea of whether the past can be changed, or whether everyone's fate has already been set. And as Faraday -- the chief proponent within the series of the closed loop theory -- moved around the island during "The Variable," acting very much like a man who now believed he can change the past, I started to believe that he could. He could really stop The Incident, save the lives of all those on Oceanic 815, prevent Charlotte from ever returning, be the big damn hero man that I so wanted him to be.

But in the end, as he lay there in the middle of the Others' camp, dying from the bullet that his mother put in him, Dan acknowledged that he was wrong, that this was the plan of the island, of his mother, of destiny, and it always had been. His mother raised him(*) and guided him towards this moment, forever keeping him on a path where he'd wind up going to the island, and where he'd be in a position to be shot by her younger self.

(*) How old is Faraday supposed to be? The Eloise who shot him in 1977 looked to be roughly the same age as the Eloise who made him give up his piano playing, and young Dan seemed like a kid who'd always lived on the mainland. (And was also relatively unaffected by the time-sickness, as compared to Charlotte and Miles.) But Eloise still seemed to be living on the island at the time, and Jeremy Davies is almost 40, so... is he playing much younger at the same time Rebecca Mader was playing much older?

And as he realized that, I began to think about the events that brought all of our characters to the island, and the ones that kept them there, or brought them back, and about how much of who they are, what they are and where they are has absolutely nothing to do with their conscious choices. Whether by fate, bad luck, the forces of the island or their own dysfunctional parents, our heroes (and some of our villains) were moved into position like pieces on a chess board, and always have been.

And I'm not sure how happy that realization makes me, even at the end of an enormously entertaining episode like "The Variable."

As I noted in discussing "Whatever Happened, Happened," the how and the why of events can be at least as compelling as the what -- that even if all the events in the past, present and future of the island are pre-ordained (in the real world, by Cuse and Lindelof; in the show's universe, by the island), seeing how the characters react to those events can be compelling. But if all our heroes are just pawns in a game they don't understand and can't control -- with the possible exception of Desmond, who survived being shot by Ben at the marina, and who has yet to re-insert himself into the main narrative -- then at some point "Lost" becomes a little less fun to watch.

Or maybe I'm just feeling slightly down, even after an episode I mostly loved, because I'm wondering -- as I did in "He's Our You" about the reason for the Ben/Sayid schism -- whether that's really all there is. Did Eloise really push Dan all his life to be a great physicist just so she could fulfill the course of history and shoot him in 1977? Yes, he's done a few important things since coming to the island -- most notably helping a younger Ellie (and an ageless Richard) deal with the radiation leak from Jughead -- but unless Eloise is a hardcore purity of the timestream nerd, surely she must have had a grander plan in mind when she set her only son on this course, no?

Did Dan maybe set something in motion that's bigger than we realize at this point? Is it possible that The Incident, and all that followed, wouldn't have happened if he hadn't come back and stirred up all this trouble with Dharma? Or is Dan, just like Charlotte after the end of "Jughead," not as dead as I'm assuming him to be?(**)

(**) This would be the point in the review where I remind you once again of the No Spoiler policy, and that includes discussing the previews for the next episode. I know the previews for the episode after "Jughead" showed a still-living Charlotte, but if Dan happens to be walking around in the ads for next week's episode, I wouldn't want to know it, and I know other people around here wouldn't, either.

Still, whatever comes next, and what the implications are about the larger scheme of the series, "The Variable" was a crackling hour, carried, as "Jughead" was, by Jeremy Davies' intense but vulnerable performance. If Faraday's dead, at least he went down fighting to undo his mistakes, and to save not only all the Oceanic 815 passengers, but Charlotte.

(Kate notes to Jack that it would be bizarre for the last few years of all their lives to be erased, and of course there's the fact that, if Oceanic 815 never crashes, Dan would never be in a position to meet Charlotte. But I'm sure he's happier with the idea of Charlotte alive but unknown to him than the end he already witnessed for her.)

Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz's script incorporated pieces of Faraday's story from throughout his run on the show, from the scene of him crying as he watched the fake crash footage in "Confirmed Dead," to his plan to use Jughead to prevent The Incident, to the idea (speculated about at least since "Jughead") that Widmore was his father. (This would make Dan into Penny's half-brother, and Desmond's brother-in-law.) I assumed we'd eventually see Dan fulfilling his pre-ordained role as the crazy-eyed man telling young Charlotte to never return to the island, but Davies still slayed me with the tenderness in his voice as he gave the speech he knew he had to, even as he hoped things would turn out differently this go-around.

(And good on either the writers or director Paul Edwards for choosing to pull back once it became clear that's what that scene was; it felt both unnecessary and almost a violation of the characters' privacy to show the rest.)

Davies has been such a great addition to the cast, and Faraday to the universe of the show, that I'll be sorry if this is it for them, whatever the larger implications may be. But he won't be the first great "Lost" character to die before his time, and with only a few episodes left in this penultimate season, he sure won't be the last.

Some other thoughts on "The Variable":

• Cuse and Lindelof have referred to "The Variable" as a sequel of sorts to "The Constant," so it made sense to feature Desmond and Penny, even if they only appeared at the beginning and end of the hour. Those two are awesome. I really have nothing else to say. But I hope the writers can find a way to bring Desmond back into the action without separating him from Penny and li'l Charlie.

• Here's how I know Sawyer's time as the all-wise leader is at an end: he's starting to get funny again. "Your mother is an Other?" was the line of the night. Though Hurley referring to 1954 as "Fonzie times" was a close second. ("Happy Days" was, in fact, originally set in 1954 1956. One of the first episodes had Richie and Fonzie on opposite sides of Eisenhower's re-election campaign.)

• Look, I'm as interested in seeing JJ Abrams' take on young Kirk and Spock as the next Trekkie, but letting the "Lost" logo morph into the star field for an extended "Star Trek" promo really ticked me off. "Lost" is a show about mood, and every bit of it -- the title sequence included -- is a part of creating that mood. And turning that sequence into product integration broke the mood, big-time.

• Along the lines of Daniel only causing things to happen that were always destined to happen, might he have set things in motion for Dr. Chang to send his wife and son off the island? I'm sure we haven't seen the last conversation between Chang and adult Miles on the subject.

• One bit of the past I would love to change: we know Radzinsky survived past the time of the Dharma purge, and I will wish somebody could just put a bullet in his brain 20 years ahead of schedule. So, so irritating. Intentionally so, I think, but still.

• Though "The Variable" wasn't designed as a special 100th episode of the series, it did manage to use more of the cast than has been the average this season, with everybody but fugitive Sayid and the gang on the island in 2007 present, and with all of them briefly hanging out together at LaFleur's cabin to make their plans. Now, togetherness isn't peachy for everybody -- check out how quickly Juliet gave Kate the sonic fence codes after she caught her man referring to her as "Freckles."

• What kind of outfit, even a relatively hippie-dippie one like the Dharma Initiative, gives a key to the gun cabinet to the custodial staff? Those guys deserved to be wiped out just for that.

That's it from me. In addition to the No Spoilers rule, let me remind you again to be courteous to your fellow commenters and make an effort to at least skim the previous comments to make sure you're not repeating some familiar insight like you're the first person it's occurred to. If a comment includes a phrase like, "I'm sorry that I don't have time to read all the other comments," it's going to be deleted. Period. Also, play nice with each other, as always.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Some Like It Hoth": Papa was a rolling stone

Spoilers for the latest episode of "Lost" coming up just as soon as I get another fish taco...

"Miles, I need you." -Dr. Pierre Chang
"You do?" -Miles

What is it about TV writers and father issues? And, specifically, what is it about "Lost" and father issues? Amongst the notably bad dads we've met and/or heard about over the years (and I'm sure I'm leaving out somebody like Boone or Mr. Eko's father):

• Jack's dad is a drunk with a God complex, who helped turn his kid into his exact replica before drinking himself to death.

• Ben's dad spent Ben's entire childhood blaming the kid for the death of Mrs. Linus, and slapped him around, to boot.

• Kate's biological father (whom she thought for decades was her stepfather) was such an abusive bastard that Kate decided the best way to deal with him was burning him to death.

• Hurley's dad abandoned him for years, and only came back after Hurley got rich (and he's probably the best of this bunch).

• Sawyer's father killed Sawyer's mom and then himself after they got conned by Anthony Cooper. And speaking of which...

• ...Locke's father was not only an evil SOB of a con artist, he even conned his own son out of a kidney, then threw his son out an eighth-story window.

• Walt didn't know his dad for most of his childhood, then his father killed two innocent people to rescue him from kidnappers and wound up blowing up on a freighter after Jack's dad said it was okay.

• Penny's father is either the chief villain of the series, or at the very least such an amoral, selfish monster that Penny is traveling the globe trying to hide from him.

Compared to all that, what little we know of Pierre Chang so far doesn't make him seem too terrible on the "Lost" Bad Dad Spectrum. It's entirely possible that he may be responsible for Miles' unwanted psychic powers, but it's just as possible that he's not, and even that he sent his wife and child away from the island because he knew bad things were coming (possibly being warned by Miles himself).

What interests me in looking at that list is how many of our characters have been given an opportunity to confront their father figures by being stranded on Craphole Island. Jack chased after his father's ghost, and may yet get to converse with Christian before it's all over. Locke came face to face with Cooper, then got Sawyer (who considers Cooper a perverse replacement for his real dad) to kill him when he couldn't. Depending on what you think the black horse from "What Kate Did" was supposed to be, Kate got to make some kind of peace with the father she murdered.

And now Miles, who has the power to talk to dead people, gets to meet the very alive father he spent his childhood wondering about, only now he's as disinterested in hearing from the man as he is in hearing from the memories of the recently-deceased.

Frankly, I'm amazed we've made it this far into the fifth season before Hurley compared a father-son relationship on the show to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

After the intense streak "Lost" has been on since "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham" through last week's "Dead Is Dead," we were about due for a breather episode. And if "Some Like It Hoth" wasn't exactly a light comic romp -- even with Miles stuck in a van with Hurley for long stretches of the episode, and even with Hurley joining a nation of millions locked together in a shared hatred of Ewoks -- it was less mythology-driven and more singular in its focus than we've seen in a while. I'm okay with that for a couple of reasons. First, I felt like we needed a breather before heading into what I assume will be the typically apocalyptic final episodes of the season.

Second, Ken Leung has been such a great addition to the show in the last two years that he deserved a spotlight already. And he delivered, proving (as Josh Holloway got to a while back) that he's good for more than just sarcastic asides. He got to nicely transition from the pierced, painfully sincere Miles at his mom's deathbed to the guy who (claims to) care about nothing but money, and will even lie about his abilities to get it... except in cases of clients who may have been just as neglectful to their sons as Pierre Chang was to Miles. And Leung made the most of his big moment, dramatically lit and accompanied by the full Giacchino strings as Miles watched his younger self enjoy the kind of father-son moment he never knew about, followed by his voice breaking as he chose to read Chang's "I need you" as something much deeper than Chang intended.

Because this wasn't as ambitious an episode as we've had lately, and because I think I can hear my pillow calling for me, I'm going to be shorter than usual and head straight for the bullet points before opening up the discussion to all of you. Some other thoughts:

• So, Hurley says his version of the "Empire Strikes Back" script would have a couple of improvements. Given that "Empire" is the one "Star Wars" movie virtually everyone agrees is great from start to finish, what exactly would you improve? Other than Leia giving a French kiss to her brother, I mean.

• God help me, but I'm starting to like New Jack. I assume that's only going to last until the island tells him why he had to come back and he starts trying to lead through impulsive bullying again, but this mellow guy who's content to leave the driving to LaFleur seems okay in my book.

• Brad Henke's character gets a name, Bram, and an intriguing backstory, as he claims to represent not only a group that knows all about Miles' history and the origin of his powers, but the team "that's gonna win." Clearly, he and Ilana haven't fallen victim to island madness, but are there with some specific purpose in mind. He and Ben haven't interacted much on Alcatraz, and Ilana hasn't acted like she knows who Ben is (and vice versa), so I have a bad feeling they could represent a third faction: not Widmore, and not The Others, but... who? A reconstituted Dharma Initiative? A hardcore Geronimo Jackson fan club?

• Does anyone really want to speculate about the meaning of the polar bear dung experiments at the Hydra, or are we all much better off assuming the reference was just there for a laugh?

• We see The Swan being built, and The Numbers are, perhaps, just random serial numbers on the hatch. Is there a deeper meaning to them at this point in time, or is "the incident" going to give them a deeper meaning after the fact, one that's going to start the chain of events that leads to Hurley's unlucky lottery win?

• Dan's back! About time! For a half-second, I wondered if he might get out of the sub and not recognize Miles (implying that Dan, like Richard, doesn't age), but instead he's just been gone from the island for a while since the events of "LaFleur."

• Phil, Phil, Phil... if the subject of an apparently incriminating piece of evidence asks you if you've told anyone else about it, you say... "Yes"! Serves you right, getting knocked out and tied up at Casa LaFleur.

• Nice to see Dean Norris (as Mr. Grey) from the amazing "Breaking Bad" in a more prominent mainstream show. Also nice to see Marsha Thomason become the latest dead Lostie to pop up again in someone else's flashback.

• Good news, bad news about the music selections in the Dharma magic buses: you can hear the great "It Never Rains In Southern California," but you might also have to listen to "Love Will Keep Us Together."

• What, if anything, can we glean from the late Felix taking photos of empty graves to Widmore, vis a vis who (Widmore, Ben, or perhaps this third group) staged the fake Oceanic 815 crash?

• Is $3.2 million the amount that Miles asked Ben for to let him go when they were hanging back in New Otherton?

• At what point, if any, during season four did Miles start to get evidence that he might have, like Charlotte, been to this island before? He had his chance to try and leave during "There's No Place Like Home," but he wanted to stay as much as she did.

As always, let me remind you of two simple rules to follow when commenting: 1)No spoilers of any kind (including the previews for the next new episode, two weeks from tonight), and 2)Make an effort to at least skim the previous comments before making one of your own, out of courtesy of those of us who are actually reading them all. If you ask "Am I the first person that's thought of...?" about something that at least six other people have clearly already thought of, it's annoying, and it's going to be deleted.

Oh, and a third one: Be nice. You can disagree with people without attacking them for not sharing your opinion. Talk about the show, not each other.

With all that in mind, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Dead Is Dead": Reversal of fortune

My seder ended early enough for me to watch "Lost" more or less on time, so spoilers coming up just as soon as I take the groceries out of my car...

"You don't like this, do you?" -Locke
"What?" -Ben
"Having to ask questions you don't know the answers to. Blindly following someone in the hopes they'll lead you to what you're looking for." -Locke
"No, John, I don't like it at all." -Ben
"Well, now you know what it was like to be me." -Locke

In honor of the Passover holiday -- and the fact that I believe I first introduced the rule in my review of last season's Ben-centric "The Shape Of Things To Come" -- it's time once again to bust out the Dayenu Rule. If you're new to the blog, or to the holiday, "Dayenu"(*) is a song Jews sing about the story of the Exodus from Egypt, in which we list all of the many great things God did for us along the way, each of which would have been enough by itself. If God had only freed us from slavery... dayenu. If God had only freed us from slavery and parted the Red Sea... dayenu. If God had only freed us from slaver, parted the Red Sea and provided manna from Heaven... dayenu. Etc. I invoke the rule when an episode of a TV show is so overflowing with awesomeness that any one particular element would, on its own, have been enough to merit a positive review.

(*) Pronounced "die-AY-new"

So, without further ado (and because, much as I liked this episode, I really want to watch the "Life" finale before I go to bed if I can), it's time to apply the Dayenu Rule to "Dead Is Dead":

• If we had only found out that Penny survived Ben's attempt on her life... dayenu.

• If we had only found out that Penny survived Ben's attempt on her life and gotten to watch Terry O'Quinn be so serenely and supremely confident as the resurrected Locke... dayenu.

• If we had only seen Penny's survival, O'Quinn being so awesome and Michael Emerson being just as awesome at playing Ben's frustration with being Locke's puppet... dayenu.

• If we had only gotten all of those things and the look on Emerson's face when Ben realized Penny had a child... dayenu.

• If we had only gotten all of those things, the look on Emerson's face when Ben realized Penny had a child, and our trip inside the Temple basement... dayenu.

• If we had only gotten all of those things, the look on Emerson's face when Ben realized Penny had a child, our trip inside the Temple basement and then the look on Emerson's face when Ben saw what he thought was the resurrected Alex... dayenu.

I could also add to the list Ben (apparently) killing Caesar as his "apology" for killing Locke, Lapidus noting that "As long as the dead guy says there's a reason, I guess everything's going to be just peachy," and Ilana and Ungalow(**) turning out to be people (agents of Widmore, maybe?) who know about the Temple. But outside of my enormous relief at realizing that Penny, Desmond and Charlie had all survived Ben's attack at the marina, what made "Dead Is Dead" so great was the acting clinic put on by the two most senior -- and, with all due respect to everybody else, most talented -- members of the "Lost" ensemble.

(**) I'm sure the Brand Henke character has an actual name, but until it's used a bunch of times in a row, I'm gonna call him after his character from "Going to California."

Despite being a Ben flashback episode, and despite taking us inside the Temple, "Dead Is Dead" was surprisingly light on new bits of mythology. We found out the circumstances under which Widmore got banished, which sound different from what I remember Widmore telling Locke (didn't he claim to have also turned the donkey wheel?), and finally got the explanation for how he could have been banished after the Dharma purge and still had a daughter as old as Penny (answer: he was slipping off to the mainland to have a relationship with a non-Other). We saw the circumstances under which Ben took Alex from Rousseau (which, if I'm reading my Lostpedia right, means she was taken before the purge and while Ben was still pretending to live with Dharma much of the time). We found out -- assuming (and this is never a safe assumption) Ben is telling the truth -- that Locke is the first person the island has ever resurrected before. And, in our glimpse of the hieroglyphics on both the wall of behind Ben's closet and in the Temple basement, we got confirmation that whatever is happening on this island in some way ties back to Egyptian mythology. (Those of you who assumed the four-toed statue was Anubis have to be feeling pretty pleased right now by the picture of Anubis on the Temple wall.)

But we still don't know what happened to Ben after Richard took him into the Temple -- specifically, how much of his evil-ness we're supposed to ascribe to the Temple and how much to his father. We don't know the details of how or when Ben returned to Dharma, how he recruited Ethan from Dharma into the Others, how and why he talked the Others into moving into the Dharma village, his relationship with Jacob and a whole lot of other things that I expect the show to get around to before we're done here.

And I'm okay with that. The Locke/Ben role-reversal, Ben's guilt over Alex's death (and the realization that he has a soft spot about killing children, or their parents, no doubt because of how he thinks his life would have been different had his mom lived), and "Alex" -- whether she was supposed to be Smokey (probably not), or Jacob, or the island itself -- telling Ben to quit plotting against Locke and start following orders was enough to keep me riveted throughout.

It's that last part that made the show especially satisfying. Ben's a fun and memorable character because you can never believe what he's saying, but that also turns him into an easy writers' crutch. Ben's mendacity gives the writers license to pull the rug out from under the audience at will, all in the name of "why should you have believed Ben this time?" And brilliant as Emerson is, that can get tiring after a while. Now, having been warned by a higher power to shut up and listen for once, Ben can't keep plotting his own game, which takes away that crutch and makes things (slightly) more straightforward from here on out. Ben is still Ben, but he's now Ben working in the service of someone else, and having to more or less be loyal to Locke, and that's going to create a really fascinating dynamic, I think.

Some other thoughts:

• We went a bunch of episodes without any Locke, and now we went this episode without any of LaFleur or the other '70s people. I assume they're all going to meet up again eventually, but until that happens, would you rather the scripts try to showcase both timelines at once, or see more character-driven stories spotlighting the characters in one era or the other?

• Were Hurley and Sawyer playing Risk when Keamy's forces turned up at New Otherton last season? I'm assuming it was their abandoned game that Ben walked past when heading for Alex's old room.

• Ben tells Rousseau, "Every time you hear whispers, you run the other way" -- suggesting, once again, that the whispers mean the Others are heading your way.

• Ben seems surprised to learn that anyone from the present day was somehow in the Dharma Initiative in the '70s. I can understand his memory being wiped about Kate and Sayid and the Ajira 316 late-comers, but does that mean he's also forgotten the presence of LaFleur, Miles, Juliet and Jin? Or is this yet another case of it not being safe to trust anything he tells anyone?

• Brian K. Vaughan and Elizabeth Sarnoff, who wrote this episode, are sadistic bastards, aren't they? They had to know that as soon as they showed Ben at the marina, that's all any of us would want to see, and so they immediately cut back from that to Ben, Locke and Sun in the jungle.

• So, should we now assume that either Ilana or Ungalow was shooting at Sawyer during the outrigger chase?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Whatever Happened, Happened": What did baby Hitler ever do to you?

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I ask Miles about time travel...

"I'm going back to find your daughter." -Kate

Miracle of miracles, a Kate episode I liked. One I really liked, in fact.

I was tempted to open this review with a quote from one of Hurley and Miles' many debates over the "Back to the Future" changeable model of time travel (Hurley's horse) versus the closed-loop "12 Monkeys" one (Miles'), since it echoed arguments we've been having on this blog all season. I don't know where in the production process this was written, but showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof had to know that, even with all of Faraday's explanations, some fans would be confused about how the closed-loop works, try to pick it apart for inconsistencies, ask about how someone could die in 1974 when they were still alive in 2004, etc.

So those scenes certainly worked as a meta commentary on the season, as Hurley scenes tend to do. But the rest of the episode was devoted to showing that the set nature of the timeline doesn't have to suck all the tension out of events. We knew that Ben would survive, because he was still alive 30 years later, but there was still plenty of drama to come out of how he survived. As Miles notes to Hurley, "we never experienced how it all turns out," which leaves a lot of wiggle room. Jack can sit on the sidelines because he just assumes Ben will be okay, and while he's right, his inaction also tells us about where Jack is now mentally (bitter because he believes -- wrongly, as it turns out -- that Kate has come back for Sawyer, and also running away from his savior complex), just as Kate, Juliet and Sawyer's attempts to save the future monster tell us who they are (that Juliet is still a fundamentally good person, in spite of all the horrible things the adult Ben will do to her, that Kate now has a strong maternal streak, and that Sawyer loves Juliet enough that he'll do this for her).

Beyond that, we get to see how our characters, whether or not they know or care about Faraday's theory, wind up affecting their own futures with their decisions. Sayid shoots Ben last week because he wants to save himself and everyone he cares about from this monster; instead, he sets in motion a chain of events that guarantees Ben will become exactly that monster. (Though I would have liked it better without Richard explaining that Ben would never remember the circumstances of the shooting. Hurley's objection to how Ben behaved when he first met Sayid in season two can be waved away as Ben play-acting, and I think a lot of the Ben/Sayid scenes in the Oceanic Six era have an added kick if Ben knows he's fashioning Sayid into the man who's going to shoot him as a kid -- and gets a sadistic thrill out of knowing that he'll survive, but that Sayid's soul will be destroyed in the process.)

Like last week's "He's Our You," "Whatever Happened, Happened" was very much a throwback to the original "Lost" episode model, focusing primarily on Kate and trying to use flashbacks to her past to illuminate her present circumstances. But where I felt disappointed by what it seemed like "He's Our You" wasn't telling us about Sayid's vendetta against Ben(*), here I gained a newfound appreciation of Kate -- and, for that matter, of Evangeline Lily -- as I found out her reasons for returning weren't what I had initially thought.

(*) A lot of commenters, by the way, made persuasive arguments that there wasn't supposed to be a betrayal -- that Sayid simply blames Ben for unleashing the killer Sayid had tried to keep bottled up for most of his life. I like that interpretation -- in many ways, it's more interesting than simply finding out Ben had once again lied to someone -- but I don't think the episode did a great job of selling it as Sayid's motivation in that episode, and throughout the last half-season.

There was no shock ending like the show often gave us (or tried to) in the earlier seasons, but we didn't need one. Sometimes, it's enough -- even richer than a twist ending -- to just see a natural emotional progression, as we watched Kate struggle with the guilt of raising a boy who wasn't hers, of keeping Aaron from his grandmother, of leaving Claire behind (even though, as she explains to Mrs. Littleton, Claire had disappeared and there was no time to look for her). Kate's a character who's generally been defined as running away from things. Here, she's running to something, and while I thought/feared that something was James Ford, it turns out her motives are much more selfless than that. She's come to rescue the mother of the boy she loves so much -- and that is a Kate I can get behind, even as I fear that she's going to wind up coming between Sawyer (who called her "Freckles" by the sonic fence) and his Juliet.

Some other thoughts:

• At first, I was troubled that none of the characters were questioning why they should be saving the man who will one day cause them all so much grief, but Sawyer dealt with it enough for my needs near the end. We've seen this kind of story so many times in other sci-fi series that the debate about killing Hitler in the cradle would have simply felt obligatory.

• Earlier in the season, I used to keep the running tally of how Sawyer and Miles were battling for island comedy supremacy. With this episode, it feels like Miles has won by default. Sawyer has matured so much that, while he can still be funny (see last week's line about how they went three years without flaming buses before Jack came back), he's much too important to be relegated to sarcastic comic relief anymore.

• I have to assume that we're going to see a whole lot more of Ben's time with The Others, possibly even Ben as a child. One of Richard's lieutenants brought up Ellie (presumably Ms. Hawking) and Charles Widmore, both last seen in 1954 in "Jughead," and we know Widmore blames Ben for his banishment from the island. If it was late '70s Ben who was responsible for Widmore's exile, as opposed to the post-purge Ben of the early '90s, then there are far fewer complications about Penny's birth, how Widmore became such a respected businessman, etc.

• It's been nearly four full episodes since we last saw Locke, from the glimpse of him turning the donkey wheel at the start of "LaFleur" until the end of this one. And while these have been among the season's strongest episodes, one glimpse of Terry O'Quinn's face as Locke enjoyed Ben's surprise at seeing him alive was all I needed to wish I could travel back in time and insert him into those episodes without messing up the timestream.

• Looks like the Dharma folk have been pretty easygoing about Juliet's surprise medical credentials, though of course not a lot of time has passed since she delivered Amy's baby.

• As most of us assumed, Sawyer was telling Kate on the chopper to take care of his daughter Clementine. It was good to see Kim Dickens again as Cassidy, and to hear Cassidy's clear-eyed take on the man Sawyer used to be, but did anyone else expect Kate to be really surprised to see that Sawyer's baby mama and her old con artist partner were one and the same? I suppose she could have figured this out on her own while preparing to meet Cassidy after her trial ended, but it seemed odd to me.

• In addition to my newfound appreciation of Kate, I have to say that, unlike Kate and Juliet, I'm kinda digging the new Jack. He's still a selfish ass in some ways, but he's a mellower, more interesting selfish ass.

• What do you make of the blonde in the supermarket? Foiled kidnapper or helpful shopper? And, of course, she looked like Claire from behind, which only added to Kate's feelings of guilt about "stealing" Aaron.

• This episode was a bit lighter on Sawyer than the last few, but Josh Holloway still had a very nice moment as Sawyer got to hear about his daughter from Kate.

• Was Sawyer's line to Kate about how they had The Others right where they wanted them a reference to a movie (maybe "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid")? To a previous Sawyer/Kate scene (maybe during the polar bear cage arc)? It sounded familiar, but it just might be the sort of thing the Han Solo types Sawyer's modeled on might say, whether or not any of them specifically did.

As always, reminder of the two basic rules for "Lost" discussion: no spoilers (that includes previews, interviews, stuff you've read/heard elsewhere, even the Darlton podcasts), and make an effort to read everyone else's comments so you're not doing a "Did anybody else think about..." point on something 16 other people have already mentioned.

With that in mind, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "He's Our You": The prisoner

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I try the dipping sauces...

"Because, Sayid, to put it simply: you're capable of things that most other men aren't. Every choice you've made in your life -- whether it was to murder or to torture -- it hasn't really been a choice at all, has it? It's in your nature. It's what you are. You're a killer, Sayid." -Ben

"He's Our You" was, in many ways, our first old-school "Lost" episode of the season. Where most other episodes have either featured lots of time travel, or two distinct storylines involving characters on the island versus those in the real world, this reverts to the original model of a story on the island where one character's struggle (in this case, Sayid's) is illuminated by flashbacks from their life on the mainland.

Of course, the show and its characters have been through enough changes that we could get a relatively traditional episode where the flashbacks all take place after the crash of Oceanic 815, while the "present-day" scenes are in 1977, but this was structured similarly to a first season episode, down to the potentially stunning moment at the end, when Sayid calmly put a bullet in the chest of 12-year-old Ben Linus and staggered off through the jungle.

How stunning that moment was, and how impressed I was by "He's Our You," will depend on a couple of things that we won't know for another week at the earliest. First, and most obvious, is whether Sayid was able to disprove Faraday's closed-loop theory of time travel by killing someone we know to be alive 30 years in the future. The second is whether there's anything more to tell about Ben and Sayid's falling-out on the mainland.

Let's talk about the "death" of young master Linus first. If Faraday is right that the past can't be changed by anyone but Desmond, than Ben's very much alive, and the show doesn't even have to stretch that much to explain it. We have plenty of past evidence (Locke and Christian's resurrections, Michael's failed suicide attempts) that the island has the power to raise the dead and/or prevent the deaths of people it has a use for. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see, early next week, young Ben getting up in amazement, then reveling in the realization that he was "special" and chosen by the island for some great purpose. And if the closed loop then keeps spinning, then the Ben who "meets" Sayid in season two remembers him well as the man who tried to kill him, and when he calls Sayid a killer in Santo Domingo, he's only throwing Sayid's own 30-year-old words back in his face.

But just for argument's sake -- and so far everything that's happened this season supports the closed-loop, "12 Monkeys" model, so I'm just having fun here -- what if Dan is wrong? What if Sayid really did kill Ben as a boy? Does the adult Ben lying in the Hydra infirmary in 2007 suddenly vanish? Does he become a walking paradox? Are we going to deal with the creation of multiple, alternate timelines, where everything the Lostaways do back in the Dharma years creates a new parallel universe, each slightly different from the one before?

The latter scenario seems to fly in the face of what Cuse and Lindelof were saying before the season began -- that if the future or past can be changed, if mistakes can be corrected through time travel, then they feel the audience can't get invested in anything the characters do. (The converse of that, of course, is that if the closed-loop theory is true, then nothing the characters are doing this season, or maybe in the life of the series, matters, because it's what they were always destined to do.)

So I'm going to assume for now that young Ben dusts himself off soon and goes running to tell his eyeliner-wearing pal Richard about his brush with death. And Sayid won't have to live with the guilt of having metaphorically killed Hitler in the cradle, or even with the moral conflict of seeing Ben be abused by his father, an abuse that no doubt helped turn him into the monster Sayid knows all too well.

And that leaves me with the more vexing question: is that really all there is to their schism in the present?

Sayid's scenes with Hurley bridging the end of last season with the start of this one implied that Sayid discovered Ben had significantly betrayed him, or tricked him, or in some other way so thoroughly violated his trust that Sayid would warn Hurley to always do the opposite of what Ben says. From what we know of Ben, that's sound advice under any circumstances, but Sayid acted as if Ben had gone beyond even his usual evil machinations, or that Sayid had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Ben had played him. But all we saw here was Ben discarding Sayid after he killed all of the men allegedly loyal to Widmore -- not that we yet know who they really were and whether they posed any kind of threat to the Oceanic Six -- followed by Sayid trying to ease his killer's guilt by building houses in Santo Domingo. That doesn't seem to track with what the previous episodes implied, and if that's all there is, I feel let down. Yes, Ben has screwed the Lostaways over six ways from Sunday, but for Sayid to feel such hate for him -- to feel the need to kill him as a boy, before he's ever done anything to anyone -- he has to feel a bone-deep hatred for adult Ben, and being turned into a hired gun doesn't seem like remotely enough motivation to me.

Maybe there are other pieces to the puzzle, but if so, we're not going the episode should have more strongly implied that they were missing. And since we still need to find out how Hurley, Kate and possibly Sun wound up on Ajira 316 -- not to mention what happened to Ben at the marina and whether Desmond and Penny are okay (please please please please please) -- I doubt there's going to be an opportunity to loop back to Sayid's backstory anytime soon.

Still, it's always fun to watch Sayid run around with his license to kill, and be suave, and to suffer torture if need be, particularly with the introduction of Oldham, the Dharma bunch's own interrogation expert, and the "he" of the episode's title. William Sanderson is at least the fourth "Deadwood" alum to turn up on "Lost" (after Kim Dickens as Sawyer's baby mama Cassidy, Robin Weigert as Juliet's sister Rachel and Paula Malcomson as murdered Other Colleen Pickett), and he made a quick and memorable impression. I suspected that Sayid would wind up simply telling Horace the truth and being disbelieved, but it was still a great sequence, alternately disturbing and funny (just as Sayid found it).

Meanwhile, after dominating the last few episodes, Sawyer takes a bit of a backseat. He's still prominent, trying to work around the Dharma folk to save Sayid, while also dealing with the complication of his ex-girlfriend turning up just as he had gotten used to his new special lady(*), but "He's Our You" was a reminder that the series hadn't suddenly turned into "Everybody Loves LaFleur."

(*) Quick straw poll: I know there are (or were) Kate/Sawyer fans, but after the last few episodes, how many people actually want Sawyer to leave Juliet for Freckles? And how many people groaned when Sawyer turned left from his front door to try to catch up with Kate?

Some other thoughts on "He's Our You":

• Some of you complained last week that, upon returning to the island, the characters are once again doing a terrible job of sharing information. Last week, Kate, Hurley and Jack somehow hung around on a cliff with Jin for 20 minutes without telling him his wife was on their plane, and here Jack and Kate apparently spent the night in the same bungalow without Kate mentioning that their respective exes shacked up while they were gone.

• Have we ever seen the adult Ben use the move he was so impressed to see Sayid use to take down Jin?

• Am I the only one who briefly wondered if the much-talked-about Oldham would turn out to be Faraday?

• The more I see of Radzinsky, the more I begin to wonder if he actually committed suicide in the Swan, or if Inman blew his partner's brains out just to shut him up.

• Radzinsky makes a reference to calling Ann Arbor for guidance on what to do with Sayid. Lostpedia tells me that Dharma co-founders the DeGroots attended the University of Michigan.

• Who wants to begin analyzing the meaning of Ben trying to give Sayid a copy of Carlos Castaneda's "A Separate Reality"? Should we take that as a sign that Sayid might have actually killed Ben?

As always, let me remind you of two basic rules around here: 1)No spoilers (which includes the previews for next week, interviews, things you've read/heard elsewhere, etc.), and 2)Make an effort to read all the comments before yours so you're not repeating a point that's already been made as if you're the first person in the world who ever had this thought. If you can't exercise the proper level of restraint and/or consideration for others, your comment's getting deleted.

With that in mind, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Lost, "Namaste": A day at the improv

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I tell you who my recruiter was...

"It's how I like to run things. I think. I'm sure that doesn't mean that much to you, because back when you were calling the shots, you pretty much just reacted. See, you didn't think, Jack, and as I recall, a lot of people ended up dead." -Sawyer

God, can we just stay in the '70s for the rest of the series?

I've been loving this season overall, but "LaFleur" and now "Namaste" feel like a cut above the rest, because the 1977 version of Sawyer may be the most appealing version of any character in "Lost" history. The three years in the Dharma Initiative has mellowed him and given him time to mature. He's the Sawyer we know (still tossing out nicknames, still chesty with Jack), but he's smarter, and sneakier, and every bit the leader that Jack mistakenly believed himself to be, and that Sawyer himself never believed he could be. When he dresses down Jack and says he's going to find a way to get Sayid out of his present predicament, I believe him. Sawyer-as-LaFleur just puts a damn smile on my face and leaves it there for the rest of the hour.

With Sawyer and his group now well-acclimated to life in the Initiative, "Namaste" was about culture shock, both for the four Ocean Six'ers cast back into the '70s, and for Sun and the other Ajira 316 folk who didn't travel through time.(*)

(*) And if there was any doubt that Caesar and the gang were on Alcatraz sometime after the freighter blew up, there shouldn't be anymore. We see Frank land on the runway that was being built during the season three polar bear cage arc, Ben knows where the outriggers are kept, and New Otherton is still as wrecked as it was after Keamy's forces blew threw and then got thrashed by Smokey. And, of course, we got the series' trademark whiplash sound effect (connoting a shift time) when we cut from the Dharma action to our first glimpse of Sun on the beach. Oh, yeah, and Christian implied that Sun had a long way to travel to find her man.

Entertaining as it was to see Jack have to dance to Sawyer's tune, and even to half-acknowledge that they're better off with our resident reader in charge, Kate does raise a good point while she's waiting with Jack and Hurley on the cliff: what the hell do they do now? Locke told them they had to come back to the island to stop the time shifts, but they had already stopped by the time they got there -- and in the wrong decade, at that. This is not going at all to plan, and my one fear about the situation is that Lindelof and Cuse are showing Sawyer to be so awesome just so they can take away his happiness and coolness. We can already see here the awkwardness when he's around Kate, and Juliet can see it, too -- her play-acting with Kate at the orientation center had a chilliness to it that goes beyond pretending to be a stranger. I don't want to see Sawyer's relatively perfect world fall apart, but the way "Lost" works, is there any way that it won't?

Certainly, introducing Sayid to the kid version of Ben Linus isn't going to make things easier. Sooner or later, Sayid's going to get out of that cage, and sooner or later we're going to find out more about Ben and Sayid's falling-out circa 2006, and Sayid hasn't spent a whole lot of time listening to Dan Faraday's theories about how the past can't be changed. He may try to kill that kid, and even though he can't succeed, he'd no doubt mess up Sawyer's situation.

And there's still the larger issue of what Ben's going to do with the Hostiles 15 years from now, which Hurley brings up on the magic bus ride to the Dharma village. Sawyer has no interest in that -- he's here to protect his friends from 2004 and only them, plus he's been an unwilling student of Professor Faraday -- but surely we're not going to spend all this time in the golden age of the Initiative without getting a different perspective on the fall.

I don't know that I buy the theory that episodes that take place solely on the island are automatically better than ones that split their focus (in recent vintage, "The Constant" and "Jughead" were pretty wonderful even though we spent a lot of time in both following Desmond in the real world), but these episodes have felt more focused than a number of the ones preceding them, even as the cast remains separated in two eras. I can't wait to see what's next.

Some other thoughts:

• After getting a few brief glimpses last time of Jin after his English language immersion course with the Dharma folks, here we get the full treatment, and you can see how much more comfortable Daniel Dae Kim is finally getting to work in his native tongue, and not just using pidgin English. Not that he was ever bad in the show's earlier years, but there was a level of assertiveness to his performance tonight that I haven't seen from him before in this role, as if he was finally getting to act without that huge weight he's been lugging around for four-plus years.

• If the name Radzinsky (the guy running The Flame and building the scale model of The Swan, aka the hatch) sounds familiar, it's because Kelvin spent a lot of time telling Desmond about him during the flashbacks in the season two finale, "Live Together, Die Alone." He had been Kelvin's partner at The Swan before Desmond, and painted the map of all the Dharma stations on the blast doors. Assuming that one of The Others didn't assume Radzinsky's name after the purge, then The Swan was still technically under Dharma control in the 21st century, which might help explain why Dharma planes were still doing supply drops after the Oceanic 815 crash.

• When Jack asks if Faraday's with them, Saywer shakes his head and says "not anymore. Something tells me Charlotte and her mom left the island by 1977. And while we're on the subject of unseen people whom Jack and company left behind in 2005, it's time for my regular query about the whereabouts of Rose, Bernard and Vincent.

• Getting back to Dan, one thing I neglected to discuss in my "LaFleur" review was how Sawyer only wound up in charge of this group after Locke went down the well and Dan lost his mind following Charlotte's death. Those two had more or less been tag-teaming as the leader during the time-skipping, due to Dan's scientific expertise and John's mystic connection to the island. But when the island stopped moving, Locke was gone and Dan was incapable of taking care of himself, let alone anyone else, and so the mantle was passed to a reluctant Sawyer again.

• I caught "The Muppet Show" on one of The Flame monitors. Were any of the others showing '70s TV?

• Christian sometimes comes off as menacing even when he's being friendly -- coming back from the dead and acting as the island's spokesman will do that to you -- but am I being a naive Jin/Sun fan in reading him as having more benevolent intentions when he interacted with Sun and Frank?

• Those of you who guessed that Amy and Horace's baby would be Ethan win the pool.

• We don't get to spend much time with the other Ajira 316 passengers, or get more clues about whether Caesar knows more about the island than he's telling or is just this plane's equivalent of Sayid, but I did catch another familiar face in the crowd. When Caesar's arguing with Frank over going to investigate the nearby buildings, we see Brad Henke, late of "October Road" but forever Ungalow from "Going to California" to me.

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Lost, "LaFleur": That '70s show

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I get my reel-to-reel going...

"James, are you sure you know what you're doing?" -Juliet
"Not yet. But I'll figure something out." -Sawyer

"LaFleur" wasn't a mind-blowing episode of "Lost," nor one where we can spend a lot of time picking over it for clues about the larger mythology. (UPDATE: Apparently, I was wrong on this. 200 comments and counting!) But boy, was it fun.

Having shown us Dan in the '70s in the season premiere, and having shown Jin driving the magic bus and wearing a Dharma jumpsuit at the end of "316," the writers didn't have much of a surprise left in showing that the rest of Sawyer's motley band also wound up hanging with Horace Goodpseed and company. But that's fine, because the storytelling model of the last few seasons means that every now and then we need a filling-in-the-blanks episode, and this was one of the more entertaining ones they've ever done. Sometimes it's nice to have an hour of "Lost" that's relatively straightforward (even with the frequent Three Years Later/Earlier jumps), that doesn't require an advanced degree from the Dr. Sam Beckett Fan Correspondence School for Quantum Theory to make sense of, that's simply about the pleasure of watching a great character like James Ford doing his thing -- and, for that matter, the pleasure of watching Juliet Burke do her thing right beside him.

I've always enjoyed Sawyer, but separating him from Jack (both during season three and this season) has been good for the character. It forces him into a leadership role, and he's even more appealing as a reluctant hero than he is as a charming irritant. The very nature of "Lost" allows the show to explore lots of genres -- sci-fi, horror, action-adventure, espionage, soap opera, personal drama -- and their archetypes, and Sawyer the con man fits well into so many of them. Here, we got to see him be all Steve McQueen (with Juliet, I suppose, as Yul Brynner) in his confrontation with the two Hostiles (the looks they trade are pure McQueen/Brynner in "Magnificent Seven"), but also to see him as the crusty but benign boss in an off-beat period workplace drama ("The Dharma Years?").

The look of pure joy on his face as Juliet told him about the successful delivery (see above) was matched only by the look of relief on Juliet's face. Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell played so well off each other throughout the episode, and sold all of the emotions as the two of them slowly assimilated into life with the Dharma Initiative. Though I like Sawyer with Kate (especially if the alternative is Jack with Kate), Sawyer and Juliet fit so well together that it was almost disappointing to see him set eyes on Freckles again at the end.

(Now that Sawyer's been with Juliet, who used to be with Jack, who's been with Kate, who used to be with Sawyer, we've finally got a legitimate love quadrangle. Quick: can anyone name an interesting love quadrangle in TV, movies or literature? Comic books? Cave paintings?)

"LaFleur" gave us a Sawyer who was finally at peace after three years of waiting for Locke to show up, and it also gave us a Sawyer who had gradually learned to let go of lying. Sure, he's still using the name Jim LaFleur, and he still has Jin searching various quadrants of the island for Locke and the others, but he's content, and he's found love, and he manages to save the day -- and win a job as Dharma's new security chief -- by telling Richard Alpert the complete and unvarnished truth. (Isn't it funny how good things can happen when people on this island share information with one another?)

I just had a great time throughout even as I wondered, like Juliet, what the point is of the Oceanic Six coming back. Locke re-aligned the wheel, the jumps stopped, the nosebleeds stopped, everyone other than Charlotte is more or less okay, if stuck 30 years in the past, so what am I missing here? What plans does the island have for the Six (and for Desmond, and, hopefully, Walt) that have nothing to do with the needle-skip problem? And how mad are Jack, Kate and Hurley going to be once they realize that they apparently didn't need to come back to save everybody?

I look forward to finding all that out, especially if upcoming episodes are as strong as this one.

Some other thoughts:

• The fine folks at the "Lost" Easter Eggs site wasted little time in getting up a screen capture of the four-toed statue in all its original glory, albeit from behind. It's probably a higher-quality than the one I made, but feel free to start analyzing either version for clues about just what this thing is. It looks Egyptian to me, particularly the things in its hands, which look sort of like ankhs. But Cuselof definitely lived up to their promise to show us the statue again, even if they didn't explain it or show us its face.

• Though this was primarily a Sawyer episode, with a generous serving of Juliet, I don't want to overlook Jeremy Davies continuing to knock it out of the park as poor, grieving Dan Faraday. The look on his face as he recognized little girl Charlotte in the '70s was heartbreaking.

• Speaking of Charlotte, interesting that her body didn't go with them (or stay with them) on the last jump. I guess whatever force was moving the rest of Sawyer's group (or holding them in place) has no power over (or interest in) the dead, unless maybe they're being touched by the living.

• After four and a half seasons of "Lost," Daniel Dae Kim finally gets to stop speaking in pidgin English. In our brief glimpses of him in the Three Years Later scenes, it's clear his time among the Dharma-ites has done wonders for his language proficiency.

• I'm a little confused about the marital status of Horace Goodspeed. When he was first introduced in season three's "The Man Behind the Curtain," he was traveling with Olivia, the character played by Samantha Mathis, and it was at least implied (enough to convince the folks at Lostpedia) that she was Mrs. Goodspeed. And Olivia was seen again as a Dharma schoolteacher when Ben arrived on the island as a little boy. Yet here, Horace is free to marry Amy as her rebound guy, so either we all misread the Olivia situation, plans changed for that character, or something more complicated is going on there.

• Speaking of "The Man Behind the Curtain," did it establish whether there were fertility problems in the Dharma days, or only after the Hostiles overthrew them? Clearly, it wasn't an issue back in the '70s, so whatever caused all the miscarriages has yet to take place.

• A good week for Hey, It's That Guy/Girl!s on "Lost." In addition to the return of Doug Hutchison as Horace, we got Reiko Aylesworth from "24" as Amy, Patrick Fischler (recently seen as comedian Jimmy Barrett on "Mad Men") as Phil and Kevin Rankin (Herc on "Friday Night Lights," and the only good thing about the "Bionic Woman" remake) as Jerry.

• Still waiting for Rose, Bernard and Vincent to send up a signal flare. Are we to assume that they're also somewhere in the Dharma village, and we just didn't get to see them this week? And, as usual, what about Cindy and the kids? Or are they supposed to be immune to the jumps somehow like the native Others?

• Note that Sawyer refers to Richard as "your buddy out there with the eyeliner." I guess they had to reference it sooner or later within the show, even if Lindelof and Cuse insist that Nestor Carbonell isn't wearing any eye makeup.

Finally, in case you missed it this morning, please take a quick skim through the guide to posting comments before you start to weigh in. Okay?

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