Oh, yeah, I forgot… Previously on Lost, three beloved characters got obliterated. One literally, and two disposed of at the bottom of the ocean, where their bodies won’t ever be retrieved. Sigh.

So, we start on Jack’s eye – this shot is a favourite convention of the show, and if somebody hasn’t already compiled all of them together, somewhere, it’s bound to happen soon enough.

He’s bleeding inexplicably from his neck again – this time, it’s a pretty serious wound, and it sticks with him once he leaves the mirror, still visible at the breakfast table later on.

Claire is staying with him and his son, and she’s there when Desmond, pretending to be someone from Oceanic, calls to tell Jack that they have found his father’s body, lost at the beginning of this season.

It’s a ruse! Desmond is clearly trying to get the Lostees in the parallel together at LAX. FOR HIS OWN NEFARIOUS PURPOSES!

Jack’s son mentioned his concert later today, and Jack promised that he would attend. Is it cynical to think that he probably won’t make it?

Back on the island, Jack is trying to clean up Kate’s wound. IT HURTS. Kate figures distracting herself with the pain of Jin and Sun’s dying will be a good way to ignore the pain.

Jack and Kate agree that Locke – nonLocke, of course – will have to die for what he did.

Looking at Sawyer now, it’s weird to think that it was only a few story days before this that he and Juliet were loving life as part of the Dharma initiative.

Desmond watches Locke return to work, and Benjamin Linus catches him, trying to make a citizen’s arrest. Desmond beats the hell out of Linus, and at the same time gives Linus a flash-insight into the other parallel. Which is interesting – so far, I think Ben is the only person incidental to the Oceanic flight in the LAX parallel who has been included to such an extent in the off-island/on-island stuff. Desmond, who can remember all iterations, gives a greater beating than is entirely necessary – he’s obviously punishing this Linus for the crimes of the other one.

There’s a great scene with Richard Alpert, Benry and Miles, as they look for the Dharma village… Miles makes reference to the time dilation thing I mentioned in reference to Sawyer, by referring to his time with Dharma as being 30 years before Benry lived there, otherwise known as last week. Benry is back on form while taking charge, as he guides the other two to where he has explosives hidden – there is some marvellously sniffy banter about C4.

Once they get to the village, though, things change, as Miles starts to have a weird reaction with all the deadness around. It’s Benry’s daughter Miles is responding to – after she was killed, and Benry left the island, Richard buried her.

LOL… “what’s that… a secret-er room?” Oh, Miles!

“Are we looking to cripple the plane, or blow it to hell?”
“Blow it to hell.”

Woah, Jim Robinson is at the village. This scientist woman of his is all over the place, isn’t she?

I’d almost forgotten the antipathy between Benry and Widmore. When Widmore left the island, it seemed to be Benry who was in charge, but Widmore has taken the edge in the intervening years. Apparently Jacob came to Widmore after Widmore’s freighter was destroyed. And now, Widmore seems to be entering end-game mode – he rigged the plane, and tells his assistant to sink the boat they came to the main island on.

She sees that nonLocke is coming, at which point Widmore tells Benry et al to hide. Like big girls.

Back in the parallel, Dr Linus explains to Locke what happened to him, as the school nurse fixes him up. What does it mean for Locke to “let go”?

Desmond turns himself in to Sawyer and Miles for what he did to Linus and Locke… which gets him put in a cell with Sayid and Kate. I’m loving Desmond’s cockiness in this parallel, but I can’t help but think it’s building up to something pretty nasty. Also, Miles mentions his father’s work at the museum – we’d seen him previously announcing Hurley at a benefit – and Charlotte is going to be there. There’s a benefit concert at the museum, and I guess that’s probably where Jack and his son are going to be – so I guess he might make the gig after all. I wonder whether Dogen will be in attendance as well?

Sawyer has his guilty moment, and Jack could be a dick about it, but instead he absolves Sawyer completely. However, I figure that won’t be enough for Sawyer.

Baby Jacob steals Jacob’s ashes from Hurley, and leads Hurley to ghosty Jacob, sitting at a fire.

Ghosty Jacob tells him that his ashes are in the fire, and when it burns out, Hurley will never see him again. Which is all mumbo-jumbo spiritual nonsense, of course, but it tallies nicely with the other fantastical elements of Jacob in this world, like the lighthouse that looks out onto distant places and… well, all that stuff.

He says Hurley should go and get his friends, because the end is very near.

“There are both great plans, but I’m going to go with surviving. If you need us, we’re going to be running through the jungle.” Miles is awesome.

Jim Robinson wants to hide from nonLocke, but Benry wants to go out and face the inevitable.

Miles wants to run, and Richard Alpert wants to try to convince nonLocke to leave with him. He says that all nonLocke wants is for Richard to join him.

What appears to happen instead is that nonLocke – as Smokey – instantly and brutally disposes of Richard.

Benry, witnessing this, calmly goes and takes a seat, and waits for nonLocke. When nonLocke appears, you already know this is going to be a great scene.

He offers Benry a trade – a whole bunch of murders for ownership of the island, once nonLocke has gone. Benry gives up Jim Robinson in a second.

Aww, Alex! And there’s Rousseau, who is marginally less crazy, and lots cleaner, in this parallel. They take the knackered Dr Linus home for dinner – he hasn’t met Alex’s mother before, and she tells him that he is the closest thing to a father that Alex has ever had.

It makes him a little teary, the big girl.

Back on the island, it’s hard to imagine that Benry, who seems to be giving up Jim Robinson and his scientist with actual relish, isn’t running some sort of game.

NonLocke dispatches Zoe without blinking, and then bargains with Widmore for the life of Widmore’s daughter.

Widmore says a thing or two about bringing Desmond to the island as a last resort, due to his unique resistance to electro-magnetism, and then Benry kills him. His argument, when nonLocke confronts him about it, is, “he doesn’t get to save his daughter.”

Then Benry quite deliberately reminds nonLocke that he had mentioned some other murders that Benry had to commit.

Everyone else meets Jacob, and to Hurley’s surprise, they can all see him. Kate confronts Jacob about his list, demanding to know why Sun and Jin and Sayid and everybody else had to die.

Then Jacob actually says the name of the episode! He promises that by the time the fire dies out, they’ll all know everything they need to, and that by then, one of them will take over protection of the island.

Locke visits Jack, and lays out their arc in the LAX parallel to date. It all sounds a little contrived when you lay it out like that, Locke!

(No, it doesn’t… Locke’s mistaking coincidence for fate, but it’s actually quite a lovely, warm scene, actually.)

Jacob talks about a mistake he made a long time ago that could cost the lives of everyone that they’ve ever met. He’s talking about what he did to his brother.

Sawyer tells Jacob that he was doing just fine before he was plucked from his other existence, at which point Jacob bluntly lays out that Sawyer wasn’t, that none of them were. He tells them what we already know – that all of their lives were shit well before Jacob pulled them out of them.

Kate’s name was crossed out because she became a mother? Hm… and Jacob utters one of those perfect lines, that the writers must have wryly smiled themselves stupid about when they came up with it:

“It’s just a line of chalk in a cave – the job is yours if you want it, Kate.”

Lol… there is a light that never goes out.

Jacob wants them to kill the monster.

Jacob isn’t going to pick the candidate… they have to choose themselves – he says he wasn’t given a choice, so he wants to give them one.

And Jack doesn’t even give anyone else a chance – he’s up there, volunteering! Of course he is. My guess is, he doesn’t get to be the one who protects the island. It’s been chosen too far from the end of the season, and nothing’s ever easy in this show.

I think Jacob just made Jack immortal. Jears 4 EVAR.

LOLS Desmond only got himself into prison so he could break Sayid and Kate out!

Tonight there’s going to be a jail-break, somewhere in this town… Uh… probably at the jail.

Oh, Ana Lucia, you are such a crooked bitch. And yay! Hurley!

Heh… Hurley recognises Ana Lucia, but Ana Lucia “isn’t ready yet.”

Desmond wtf. Mind you, he’s got good taste, getting Kate to put on a little dress and go to the concert with him.

NonLocke walks because he likes the feel of the ground under his feet. It reminds him that he was once human. The big softy!

NonLocke isn’t fussed that Desmond isn’t in the well. He says that Desmond was Jacob’s failsafe – in case his precious candidates all died. Is he saying that Desmond wasn’t a candidate? He says that Desmond can help him destroy the island.

And that’s that. Penultimate episode, done. Finale here I come…

So we’re scant episodes from the end of the line, and Lost decides to take another step out of it’s ongoing story to tell us a tale of the distant past. As with “Ab Aeterno” a few episodes ago, I’m guessing it’ll give us some interesting but not vital background, that this late in the day will frustrate those of us eager to see how it all pans out, but that we’ll probably appreciate a lot more on later viewing.

I think if I was writing the final season of a show like this, with the working knowledge that geek love is a painfully co-dependent and resentful sort of love – as likely to exert the full, grumpy weight of thwarted expectation and entitlement as it is to just revel in the exhilaration of being taken on a fun ride for forty minutes of every week – and I knew that we’d managed to get the incredibly versatile and captivating Alison Janney on for an episode, I think I’d probably be unable to resist the mischevious instinct to use her as a mouthpiece for a fond yet firm assertion that I felt the audience needed to hear, too.

And so, they do… when the breathy, beautiful and unfortunate Claudia, shipwrecked and heavily pregnant, can’t help but blurt constant, desperate questions at Janney’s character, she answers a couple in an indulgent fashion, and then states, firmly but not quite yet impatiently:

“Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.”

…Which is something I’ve been saying in response to the complaints I’ve been hearing about all of the unanswered questions in the show since around the second season. A better story is one that smartly leaves just big enough gaps for the imagination to fill, because for every person who feels a relieved sense of closure when a long-asked question gets answered, there are two others who don’t like the answer that they’re given, or find that what they wanted wasn’t just an answer to that question, but to have all of the details definitively described. And of course, once you have all of the details of a world filled in, you aren’t experiencing a story any more, you’re simply collecting trivia. And there’s always more of it.

It’s healthy, when making a genre show or entertainment, to remember that ultimately fandom is a slightly autistic practice – and while in this case it’s positive to allow your fans to exercise the part of their brains that looks for connections and enjoys the detail, as with any obsessive or potentially overwhelming mental condition, it’s not a great idea to pander to it. Once you give someone in the grip of a compulsion that they don’t entirely recognise – in this case, the search for answers to questions – what they think they want, it just pushes them deeper down the spiral, because it isn’t the solution that they’re attracted to… it’s the problem.

It isn’t the answers that entice an audience with a show like Lost… it’s the mystery. That’s why every time there’s a major insight into one of the big mysteries – such as the first appearance of the smoke monster, which itself answered the question “what the fuck is the thing in the jungle???” – people react with disbelief, and insist that there has to be more.

A good story is like a sausage, or more like a magic trick – it’s so involving and transporting that the response one has to it is something more than can be explained by the examination of the sum of it’s parts. Magicians perform the trick, and everybody wonders how it worked. The magician tells you it’s magic, and on one level – the level that went “Oooo” when they saw the trick – you choose to believe them, but at another, very human one, you start to work away at the trick logically, trying to work out how it happened. The magician doesn’t tell you the true mechanics of the trick, but if they did, some part of you is always still a little lost and disoriented, and perhaps a bit despondent about it, because knowing the mechanics of it doesn’t explain how the trick transported you in the first place. If the magician is smart, he doesn’t go on to bring up the house lights, or explain to you how his words and actions misdirected you at the same time. Partly because it would ruin his livelihood, but mainly because it still wouldn’t really get to the bottom of the trick. The magic doesn’t actually happen on the stage or the show – it happens in the audience’s head. If the magician breaks it down into such easily digestible parts that every angle of the trick is explained to the audience, there isn’t a trick any more… there are just a bunch of bits and pieces on the floor, and even if an audience member can remember how they all fit together, the trick won’t really work for them any more.

Of course, there are magicians who purport to show you how the tricks work – and even go to great lengths to shed light on corners of the tricks to the extent that the audience believes they’ve seen all of the workings of them – but those guys know exactly how far they can go, and still leave enough grey and fuzzy area that the audience still ends up shocked and wondering.

And so far, Lost has been pretty excellent at being one of those magicians. In fact, the times when the show have been less fun for me have been when it’s lost sight of that peculiar relationship a story has with it’s audience, and tried too hard to close gaps and fill in too many details. And ironically, as much as the words Janney’s character spoke early in this episode triggered off this huge diversion, I’m already a little concerned that episodes like this and Richard’s one are a bit too preoccupied with filling in detail and world-building in areas that we think might be nice to have a little more information, but actually we don’t need to.

… and breathe.

So, anyway, shortly before Janney inexplicably bashes Claudia’s head in with a rock:

…Claudia gives birth to her son Jacob, and an unexpected, unnamed twin.

Janney, named in the credits as Mother, raises the two boys as her own, and immediately we start to see the two characters – of Jacob and the man in black – as they grow into the entities that we know now.

There’s something mythical about the episode – the shipwrecked woman from an unknown place – the archetype of Mother – the named boy Jacob with his inability to lie, and the unnamed boy who is “special”, tries to keep secrets, and dreams of places other than the island that he is told don’t exist. There’s magic thinking aplenty, and constant hints at allegory, and it’s a lot of fun, but doesn’t feel necessary, or much like an episode of Lost, really.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boy non-Locke has been seeing over and over over the last few episodes is the young Jacob.

The young unnamed one has a lot more sense and capability than Jacob, who is actually a bit of a retard. And he can see dead people – or at least he can see his own dead mother – and one wonders whether the fact that he can has anything to do with the fact that Hurley can.

And there’s Jacob’s violent streak, that we saw in him when he first met Richard, but that had levelled out into a more gentle temperament by the time we first saw him. The unnamed brother fucks off to the human camp, desperate to work out a way off the island.

OH BY THE WAY, THERE WAS, LIKE, A POND WITH LIGHTS IN AND THAT. It was weird, and not like anything we’d seen before.

The boys’ Mother is constantly weaving, and Jacob takes on the trait in later life. I mean, literally weaving, but it also turns out to be a characteristic of his personality when we get to know him.

Jacob also visits his brother in the camp, where they play games, and the unnamed twin tells him that the people are manipulative, selfish, greedy and horrible. But that they are a means to an end. This dude really wants to get off the island, and while there’s lots of myth-building going on here, there’s also a lot of vague metaphor. The unnamed aligns himself with the humans, uses their knowledge and skills, but loathes them. Jacob loves the island, the Mother kills the son… And the Light signifies something, but fuck knows what.

Oh, there’s that bottle…! And Mother is chanting. She is one magical kind of bitch, although thus far every way she’s imposed herself on the world around her has involved people’s heads and big bits of rock.

And Jacob is a bit of a petulant sissyboy, really – hard to see how he’s going to be transformed into the man with the plan that we’re used to in the next ten minutes… Maybe it’s something to do with the drinking?

Huh. The brother isn’t dead… just resting? Or possibly she just knocked him out long enough to raze his excavations and kill all of his people? She’s a bit Rousseau, when it comes to it!

Now I’m wondering how the unnamed becomes the black smoke, and I’m thinking it might be through sheer force of rage. He murders Mother, but it’s difficult to see it as entirely unprovoked at this point. Poor bastard.

And there are the stones!

See, these two, their story is all about free will and following order. But free will doesn’t make you happy, and apparently doing what you’re told just turns you rigid with certainty.

Oh, okay, so it’s not rage… Being chucked down into the light and water that Mother told Jacob was worse than dying is what done it. I’m wondering if that’s what dissipated the light to it’s diminished form in the present day, too? So the unnamed chap – the smoke monster – maybe contains the source now, too?

Oh right so Jacob’s brother’s body is dead, and his and Mother’s bodies are what Jack and Kate found in the first season – as Locke puts it, “our very own Adam and Eve”?

But other than that, we really haven’t learned much more about Jacob or the other one, beyond a little bit of paint-by-numbers in the more obvious areas – “Oh, SO YOU MEAN THE BITS THAT LOOK LIKE SKIN ARE FLESH COLOURED? And the ORANGES are ORANGE?” – They were born, once, and then they started hating each other. One of them became immortal, and the other became smoke. We knew this already…

Nice episode, but I don’t see how they can revisit this particular content before the end, so choosing to not-quite-answer these particular questions when there are other much more pressing questions that they could be not-quite-answering seems a bit silly.

Oh, by the way, the correct answer to the question “what the fuck is the thing in the jungle?” is “It’s the smoke monster.”. And the correct answer to the question “what the fuck is the smoke monster?” is “It’s… the smoke monster. Are you retarded? Isn’t that enough? It seems plenty to me!”

I have a sneaking suspicion that in the final analysis, they will all turn out to be facking dead, won’t they?

So Jack saved Locke, and he thinks he’s a candidate for a surgery that Jack is developing. John Locke doesn’t want to be a candidate, though. He seems to recognise the phrase. Jack could do with having House MD on his side.

Jack wakes to Sayid telling him that they’re on Hydra island. Sayid even makes a joke. Actually, I reckon Sayid might be back on the turn again.

Jim Robinson was totally about to pop a cap in Kate’s head, then. I don’t like the way people keep pointing guns at Kate, with a clear willingness to pull the trigger. It makes me think something bad might happen if people keep doing that. Her name isn’t on that list – people keep saying so, dammit.

Bernard was Locke’s doctor, back in the alternate. Jack is totally on the case, trying to find out how Locke lost the use of his legs. He is totally up for invading the crotchety old cripple’s privacy, yo.

Sawyer and Kate are back in the cages. Last time they were in there, they were snogging, you guys.

Ut-Oh… the generator is totally down at Camp Widmore… and now here comes old Smokey. He likes to kill people, remember?

It’s weird that in both universes, Jack and Locke/non-Locke have this weird connection – at the beginning, they butted heads constantly.

John’s father is a vegetable. Total vegetative state, y’dig? He looks all broked.

All the Lostees are together, about to stage a final assault on Widmore’s submarine.

…And non-Locke is being surprisingly magnanimous about Claire’s betrayal.

(Hn. When was the last time we saw Rose and Bernard? I guess Jack could always hook up with them, if he stuck around on the island.)

Um… what makes these guys think that Jim Robinson won’t have rigged the submarine up the way he did the jet? Dude is crazy!

OH SHIT YOU GUYS KATE IS DOWN.

And of course, Jack has to go on the sub now, cos he’s the only one that’ll be able to save her.

Non-Locke has clearly done something with the C4, hasn’t he? Left it on the sub as insurance. OH OF COURSE. This is the most MacGyver this show has ever been. The Lostees trapped on a sub with a block of C4 and a ticking clock. OH FUCK OH FUCK.

Oh Sayid. When someone blows up so definitively in this show, it normally means they’ve just died for reals. He totally sacrificed himself for the rest of them. If this was 24, the final pips at the end would totally be missing. And bloody blimey, Sun is stuck under something very heavy, so it’s quite possible she’s a dead un as well.

I am totally freaking out here.

Did… Lapidus got killed too, right? By exploding door? In an eighties disco?

I am totally making sadface right now.

Jack put it all together, didn’t he? We already knew that non-Locke couldn’t kill the Lostees, but I totally hadn’t realised the whole POINT of his scheme was getting rid of them, I just assumed he’d do it later. Now Sawyer gets to carry around the same guilt that Jack has been for ages, because for just this once, Jack was right, and Sawyer was wrong, and pretty much every cast member got blown up because of it. I’m very upset. Like I said about the previous episode, every event is full of meaning and consequence by now, and this is truly perfect TV.

So Hurley, Kate, Jack and Sawyer on the beach. Lapidus, Sayid, Sun and Jin in the sub. Yeah, you should cry, Hurley. Just this once, I’ll even allow a few Jears. That’s almost half of the meaningful surviving cast wiped from the slate in one go. And it’s possible Hurley won’t see the upside to the sudden boost in numbers of potential voices in his head.

And finally, there’s non-Locke, pissed at the fact that there are survivors, and set to finish the job. Thinking about it, I think Claire might be set to turn against him when she works out what he’s doing. Come to that, she must be on the list of people he needs dead too, huh?

Jack’s sweetest moment in ages was last episode, where he deferred to Hurley. Now he asks Hurley’s permission to go and talk to non-Locke. It is a lovely moment.

And now non-Locke admits what we had already worked out – that he was the vision of Jack’s father from way back in that first or second episode. He says it was because they needed to find water. And that makes a certain amount of logical sense, but it’s difficult not to see that it was a pretty cruel choice to make on non-Locke’s part.

Back in the parallel, Benry’s being very kind to Locke in the back of an ambulance. Sun and Jin are arriving at the hospital at the same time, and Sun recognises Locke and is afraid of him… whether it’s because she’s got some innate instinct, or because she’s in extremis, it’s difficult to tell.

Claire has an awkward but oddly sweet moment with her half-brother Jack in the jungle.

However, back in the clearing Sawyer and Kate are telling Hurley and Jin about their escape plan, and that’s putting further division in the newly reunited group, because Claire and Sayid aren’t invited.

Sayid has gone to the dark side, but Hurley believes that you can always bring people back from the dark side.

In the parallel LA, the pieces are starting to come together – Sawyer is talking to Kate, in captivity, when he and Miles get the call to go out to the site of Sayid’s unwitting rescue of Jin.

(Still find it interesting that Miles and Hurley in the parallel don’t seem to have their powers… but that adds to the likelihood that this isn’t really an actual, genuine, alternate reality… In Miles’ case, I suppose it might be because he wasn’t actually born on the island in that iteration, but what about Hurley? Maybe he just hasn’t known anybody who died there, yet?)

Um… At this point, Desmond is maneuvering the Lostees back in LA in a very similar manner to the way Jacob and the man in black have been doing. It would seem to be positioning him as the natural replacement for one or the other of the two ancient island geezers.

Non-Locke is about to go to war with Widmore, after a show of strength by Widmore forces his hand. This pushes Sawyer to put his own plan into action, but it’s possible that trusting Jack to help with a plan that abandons his newly rediscovered sister Claire to fate isn’t such a great idea.

Non-Locke has promised Sayid that he can be reunited with Nadia if he just keeps on killing people on non-Locke’s behalf. This puts him at the top of the well that non-Locke dumped Desmond in – a well that doesn’t look nearly as deep now as it did in the previous episode – with a loaded gun aimed at the still alive Desmond.

Back in the alternate LA, Sawyer and Miles have just arrested Sayid.

And on the island, oh dude – Sawyer’s plan also relies on Kate betraying Claire, and that seems like one badly judged choice too many on Sawyer’s part. That isn’t like him at all.

You know, I actually feel for Claire – I mean, everybody keeps leaving her. Everybody.

(Also, I feel for Claire because, well, she’s a bit sexy.)

Heh, Ilana looks better as a lawyer than she does as a… whatever she was. Her people have been looking for Claire for a bit, over in parallel LA.

OH SHIT CLAIRE HAS A GUN ON KATE OH SHIT. She’s mental, so anything could happen. Anything. ANYTHING.

Oh, she’s let Kate have the gun. Phew.

Hn. I guess Ilana was looking for Claire to attend the reading of Dr Shepherd senior’s will. So here’s Jack and his son. Jack, who didn’t know that Claire was his half-sister. Desmond is a little tinker for putting them in a room together like that, isn’t he?

At this point, every scene is so layered with meaning and history that it doesn’t even really matter where the thing is headed. I know I keep saying that, but it’s because I feel like this – this show is nothing more, and nothing less, than the greatest soap-opera there ever was.

When Jack decides to jump off the boat, you know it probably won’t ultimately make any difference – Jack is always doing shit like this.

And when Jin and Sun are finally reunited, you can’t help but feel a little sentimental, knowing that it’s been so many years – both narratively and in viewing time – since they’ve seen each other, even though you know that you’ve been manipulated into feeling that way.

The end-game in the alternate LA is also allowing them to pull off some perfectly cheesy moments of happenstance, to the extent that Sawyer in particular even comments on it this episode, culminating in Locke’s appearance on Jack’s surgeon’s table. In the LAX waiting room, Jack had intimated that he’d like to try and fix Locke’s paralysis, and I won’t be surprised if an upcoming episode sees the parallel Locke on his feet again.

Course, the average soap-opera doesn’t end an episode with Jim Robinson’s people dropping artillery strikes on the unreliable older brother out of Party Of Five, which is what makes Lost the absolute greatest. For sure.

(Watch non-Locke in the bottom left of the frame. Doesn’t. Move. AT ALL. Non-Locke is a bad-ass.)

Maybe it’s because it’s late, or maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot going on and am feeling tired and emotional, but right now I’m not even trying to theorise what it might all mean, because it almost feels like most of those questions keep being answered, but the answers just aren’t as complicated or complete as we were hoping they might be. I am just enjoying the ride, dudes.

(Oh, but one last thing that resonated with me – when Jack tells Sawyer that leaving the island is wrong, and explains how he felt the last time – as much as it seems to be the sort of confused emotional back-flipping that the character has always been prone to – it felt evocative of the scene last episode, where Michael tells Hurley that the whispering voices are the people who died but could never leave. It’s also interesting that for the first time, Jack’s major malfunction – that he won’t be told what to do, to a fault – is being explicitly voiced by other characters, and mirrors perfectly the original John Locke’s personal, rebellious mantra of “Don’t tell me what I can’t do”.)

So, like, Libby! I love Libby! I’m so glad they’re actually doing something with her character. I already know that Mr Sulman will have been thinking of me when he saw this episode, because I’ve been going on about her since, like, she died and that.

Oh, and whossname – Ilana – wants to follow Richard’s lead and blow up the plane. Then she got blown up. Which just shows that the showrunners do sometimes listen to the fans, even though I never really understood the apparent antipathy toward the character shown by the internet, when all she really was was new. It wasn’t like she was any more obnoxious or stubborn than any of the already established characters.

So, Desmond has some Machiavellian plan going on, that involves getting inside the rich and super-successful Hugo’s head, and convincing him to go find Libby.

Desmond’s chicken order is totally number “42″, people.

Libby is crazy, and recognises Hugo from the island parallel.

And it takes a kiss from Libby to suddenly make Hugo see it too. Further enhancing the idea that the point of this whole season is “love is all you need”.

Desmond is pretending he doesn’t know that non-Locke is non-Locke, but non-Locke isn’t stupid, I reckon – Desmond was never this happy or cocky before.

Hugo is playing fast and loose with the truth by this point, too – because people are listening to him, and it makes him feel kinda funny. But still, Hugo basically rules, going as far as to have a Michael Bay moment of runny-away-from-explodo as he blows up the Black Rock:

Also, Benry gets philosophical about what the island does to people once it’s done with them, Miles comments on the fact that Hurley just goes along with everything the dead people tell him to do, and then Richard leads Miles and Benry off on a mission to blow shit up

Desmond sees the child that is taunting non-Locke, and finds it desperately amusing.

Hugo has a bit of a Miyazaki moment, when he realises – and then has it confirmed – that the whispers in the woods are the spirits of people who for one reason or another couldn’t move on. Michael confirms this – trapped as he seems to be by the murders he committed on the island. And the moment where Michael tells Hurley that if he ever sees Libby again, can he tell her that Michael is very sorry, is one of the most perfectly delivered and affecting pieces of acting I’ve seen in ages. Michael was under-served by his story arc when he was a series regular, but every appearance he has made since he and WAAAALT! left the island the first time has been lovely.

Then Hurley leads the last of the survivors back to non-Locke’s camp, which must be the first time in a long time that all of the main characters have been together.

The thing is, I’ve thus far only heard from people who were disappointed by the end of the show, and it’s apparent lack of answers – possibly a side effect of my avoiding any real serious discussion of it all – but thus far this continues to be exactly the sort of show I want to watch. At least one person reading this has heard me say that the only thing that will truly leave me cold is if they end the show without any further comment on Libby, and this episode fulfilled that particular requirement, without really resolving anything, and that’s all I wanted – some sign that one of the warmer, more human moments in an otherwise quite unrelentingly harsh wasn’t just going to be discarded wholesale.

The mystery, and supernatural weirdness, was the hook that got people making the effort to watch each episode of this show as soon as possible, but it wasn’t the heart that got and kept people engaged in the first place – and I think the show is weakest when it ignores characterisation in it’s rush to the next WTF moment. Hugo episodes area always pretty big on sweet, well-sold emotional moments – not just from Hugo himself, but in the interactions they prompt with him from the other characters, and Libby, Michael, Jack, Richard, Miles and Desmond all benefit from the humanising touch of one or more of those encounters in this episode.

And finally, Ben Linus thinks Desmond is a paedophile, but all Desmond is interested in is the crippled Locke.

Who… uh… Desmond just ran down in his car.

A few minutes ago, mind, non-Locke did chuck Desmond down a very deep well, for not seeing the point in being afraid, so who knows what the fuck sort of resentment that’ll breed?

So Desmond wakes up, and apparently he hasn’t been quite conscious since we last saw him, when Benry attacked he and Penny.

Is it me, or is this the first time Jim Robinson has actually been civil to Desmond? He seems generally nicer this season, doesn’t he?

Widmore’s people are planning to run a test using our Mr Hume, but first it’s suggested that there may be some rabbit death. But there’s a bit of scientist slapstick with a lever that ends with some hapless red-shirt getting burnt to shit by a catastrophic electromagnetic event before that can happen:

Apparently Jim Robinson does know the meaning of the word sacrifice. He mentions losing his son to the island – I’m wondering whether that’s something we’ve seen before, as I can’t immediately recall it. He suggests that Desmond is going to be asked to make one, for the sake of the whole world. At some point after they give him the Doc Manhattan test. Because apparently he’s the only person who’s ever survived a catastrophic electromagnetic event, back when all of his clothes got vanished off and the hatch blew.

They run the test, and instead of him turning blue and showing off his winky, we’re flashed across to Desmond in what appears to be the other version of the Lost universe, at the point when flight 815 arrives in LA:

He’s working for Widmore, who apparently loves the fuck out of him here:

Hm. Widmore’s asking him to babysit Charlie, who has some connection to Widmore’s son – who is alive in this version. It becomes apparent that Desmond isn’t with Widmore’s daughter in this alternate. Actually, Penny hasn’t been mentioned at all, yet. Widmore offers him scotch – I’m pretty sure it’s the same scotch he’s previously said was worth more than Desmond’s life – but this time out, nothing’s too good for Desmond. He is, apparently, worth it.

Charlie, it turns out, is an obnoxious, whiney dick. I applaud the showrunners’ attention to detail, as this is pretty much how we met him in the first place. In fact, Charlie was a pretty big dick right up until the day he died, wasn’t he?

Aww, Charlie saw a blonde vision – maybe Claire? – as he was dying on the plane. And he’s right… Jack is a bloody idiot!

Desmond frames Charlie’s situation as a choice, which is a cool nod to his attempts back on the island to save Charlie from his fate. And once again, Charlie forces Desmond to watch him drowning. This time, he manages to save him.

But not before Charlie flattens his hand to the glass, and Desmond flashes on the last time he saw Charlie back in the reality that we’re so used to.

Taken to hospital after the incident, Desmond is forced to have an MRI, which triggers more of the flashes, this time keyed around Penny Widmore. Before the flashes start, Desmond is given a panic button – the word “button” clearly causes him some concern.

Nobody will give Desmond any help when it comes to finding Charlie, but OH LOOK there’s the bloody idiot himself! Interestingly, Jack and Desmond recognise each other, and neither acknowledges the fact that Desmond seemed to vanish on the flight, which makes me wonder whether it’s going to be addressed, or treated as just a gap in our knowledge.

Finally he finds Charlie, who is insistent that none of this reality actually matters. Charlie seems to be quite in touch with the weirdnesses that are going on, and oh, goodness I just remembered that Widmore may have been Faraday’s… that Faraday’s mother and Widmore had something going… hang on. Now I can’t remember what I remember.

So Faraday’s mother is Eloise, we knew that, right? But now she’s Eloise Widmore? That’s not a stretch, I guess, and that makes Daniel Faraday Daniel Widmore? Did we already know all this?

And… Penny Milton? What? What? Eloise Widmore knows more than she should. Which immediately makes this alternate seem like it doesn’t fit my thoughts, or any of the others I’ve heard. Eloise, by the way, suggested that Desmond had got exactly what he wanted, which does tie a little into at least one theory I’ve heard, about the alternate being the met wishes of our Lostees, but unless Eloise is working in cahoots with the nonLocke, or the Other masquerading as Locke was working through her in both realities, it still isn’t clear what’s going on.

Of course. Of course it would be a Desmond episode that started things unravelling. Daniel Widmore sees someone at the museum? I’m guessing Charlotte? And then suddenly he’s writing things down that he could only have known from our original Lost reality?

This show is fucking awesome, is what it is. Fucking, fucking awesome.

It looks like everyone Desmond meets seems to be struggling with the dual realities. Both Charlie and Daniel are equating the breakdown of the walls between them and their alternate realities with love, and that’s poignant, because it was the mention of Penny that got Desmond going and…

And Desmond is about to have the exact same first meeting with Penny that he had with Jack in our reality. She is his constant, and I guess so is this place.

All it takes to send Desmond back to the old and dirty reality is meeting Penny, but something weird happened there. At the beginning of this flash sideways, Desmond was completely at home with that version of himself, which suggested that this wasn’t our Desmond in continuity – that is, as with the other flashes throughout the show, Desmond wasn’t experiencing the flash as a flash – only the viewer could see what was happening. By the end, though, it seemed fairly clear that when Desmond came round, he remembered everything the Desmond in the flash had experienced. So even if he wasn’t consciously aware of the dual realities during the flash, when we came back to the prime reality, the Desmond who had just gone through the massive electromagnetic experiment remembered everything that we had just seen.

This isn’t the first time Desmond has broken the mould with the flashes. He just gets few enough episodes that it’s always noteworthy when it happens…

Desmond wants to help Widmore, now – a lot can happen in twenty minutes.

Luckily, just when it appears everything is going to go smoothly for someone, Sayid turns up – lovely, tormented, beautifully curly Sayid – and kills some dudes. He tells Desmond he’s in danger, and he has to leave, and Desmond, oddly, says that of course he’ll go with the Arab adonis.

And then he flashes back to the other reality, with Penny on the steps. And then he asks his driver – George, who we’ve seen before, on Widmore’s first boat to the island – to get him the passenger manifest for Flight 815. When asked what he wants it for, he says that he needs to show them something…

But what?? It’s probably no accident that he used similar terminology to Charlie’s, moments before Charlie forced the two of them off the road. It seems clear that Desmond intends to try and show the Lostee’s counterparts in the alternate reality that there is another world – the “real” one. But how he intends to do this, I don’t know. Perhaps he’ll take a page out of Charlie’s book, by getting them all on a coach and running it off a pier?

The more it goes on, the more it feels like, even if the actual incidents don’t seem to be piling up in the “wish-powered alternate reality” corner, the exposition reveals seem to be preparing the ground for that particular narrative endgame, and if that is the case, my disappointment won’t be because I’ve been wrong about it all along, so much as because as I’ve said before, I prefer this show when it veers more toward science-fiction than science or theology-fantasy.

Not that it matters, at this point – nothing anybody hopes for can probably change what the showmakers have planned for the final few episodes, and it’d be crass of me to try and suggest that I won’t love the last few episodes if they continue the high quality of this one, with it’s twisty turns and it’s “oh wow” moments for the fans. I’m not a particularly demanding TV viewer, and will forgive the show a finale that doesn’t do what I want it to, balanced against all the hours of enjoyment it’s given me where it did.

I think I’m just a bigger fan of the questions than I am of the sorts of answers that I’ll probably get – in a show like Lost, the questions are where it thrives, and many huge and interesting ideas hide within them, and all the typical TV resolution of those questions can ever mean is a closing down of possibilities – a reduction of the theories down until only one or two can exist. To me, that means that the show will go from the sort of entertainment that has something for everyone – at least within quite a wide band of viewing individuals – to one that by necessity will start to exclude some of those individuals in the final few chapters.

You don’t have to do that when you close down a mysterious story – some of my favourite books and films of the last few years leave major questions unanswered – but even the most masterful of writers falter at the point where they try to provide resolution to a story that thrived best in the areas where it dealt in ambiguity and ideas – the key example I can think of at the moment is “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman, or almost any of Stephen King’s longer works, like “It” or “The Stand”.

It’s testament to how well made this show is, and how great most of the actors are, that Desmond episodes, which are nearly always the catalyst for one or t’other of my theories to be thrown out, what with the timey-wimey magicifying effect he has on the show universe, are also among my favourites, and always knock my socks off. Whatever that means.

Anyway, so episode 10 is done, and we’re clearly on the final lap. This episode was a giant step in the finale’s direction, I reckon, and it was lots of fun. But more Hurley next week, please!

Hmm, so NonLocke is happy to tell Jin about the cave with the names in it, and he raises the question again, of which Kwon is a candidate, or whether both of them are.

So now I’m wondering – whose sideways flash are we looking at, Sun, or Jin? Or are these two crazy kids so close now that they count as one?

Sayid tells NonLocke that he doesn’t feel anything, and that makes me wonder whether people didn’t jump the gun somewhat, assuming he was infected with something evil. Seems he’s just become numb.

And that makes me think of Jacob… how he used to be violent, back when Richard met him, but later became less human, more set apart and restrained. Every time, except that last time, Sayid has killed someone, it’s been because he was duty bound to do so, and I wonder whether that doesn’t equip him better to replace Jacob than anyone else. What if becoming numb is part of that process.

When NonLocke’s done his bit, he leaves the camp, and that’s when Jin decides to leave, and Sawyer tries to stop him. Sawyer has told Jin about the deal he’s made with Widmore, which shows that he trusts Jin, but he hasn’t told Jin that he’s planning on double-crossing Widmore, which shows that maybe Jin can’t trust him. But by this point, and it’s one of the things I love about the character, Jin can’t be managed or coerced – he’s become very much his own man, after being a slave to tradition, or Sun’s father, and being buffeted by events that other characters get to engage in, but best of all it’s happened to him quietly.

Reconciling with Sun such a long time ago seemed to positively affect both characters so much that it’s hard to believe that at this point they haven’t been together for, what, two and a half years, our time, and four years their own.

Jin’s about to shove his way past Sawyer when Jin pitches over, followed quickly by Sawyer and the rest of NonLocke’s followers, as they are hit quickly by tranquiliser darts.

The soldiers we saw watching the camp at the beginning of the episode walk into the clearing, and after a quick search, find who they’re looking for. It’s Jin, and this episode suddenly got more important, because these guys obviously work for Widmore, and why the hell would Widmore want Jin?

Back in the sideways flash, it seems that Sun and Jin have not married, and are still very much the young and loving couple – that stuff on the plane, where Jin was back to being the Alpha-male jerk-off husband was all a cover. Jin is worried that somebody might be watching, and it seems clear that he’s got a reason to be paranoid about something – probably Sun’s father, if he isn’t yet married to her, and is employed by that crazy crooked bastard.

It’s a paranoia that continues to their seperate hotel rooms, with Jin checking behind his back as he waits for her to open her door, but it doesn’t stop him being enticed into Sun’s room. And she’s a frisky minx at this point – it’s lovely seeing them flirt, even if it does stop him going and doing the job he’s supposed to do.

Sun doesn’t want anything to do with anything but Jin, back on the island, and she’ll tell off Jack, and thwart NonLocke, rather than be swayed from that path. But then, that doesn’t exclude she and Jin from being candidates – if all either of them need is each other, and as it’s starting to appear, the real world isn’t that safe for them as a couple, why couldn’t they stay on the island together, as its keepers?

Because without their married lives going to shit in the shadow of her father, Sun still wanted to try and convince Jin to run away with her when they got to America.

Also, Sun is having trouble with the mirror, but at this point it’s unclear what exactly that trouble is. We’ll see what the deal is with them at some point, I’m sure. Although, with this show, maybe that’s a dangerous assumption to make!

Hang on. Hang on hang on… So Martin Keamy’s appearance in that previous episode’s flash sideways had appeared to be a cute bit of coincidence-building – the show-runners are having fun pulling in old faces for those flashes – and I’d written off Jin’s appearance as his captive as another piece of intricate plot-threading designed to create a link between Jin and sideways Sayid, more than anything else.

And that notion would stand up to scrutiny, even including Keamy’s appearance here, if it wasn’t for Widmore’s interest in Jin now. After all, Keamy worked for Widmore the last time we met him, and it’s reasonable to assume that a powerful man like Sun’s father might have dealings with a powerful man like Widmore…

So Jin’s in Room 23. We’ve seen this before. The Dharma Initiative used the room to try and brainwash people with subliminal messages, but it’s unclear whether that’s what Widmore’s people intend to do to Jin. The only thing that’s certain at this point is that everything changes.

But you, of course.

Oh, hang on. It’s actually because he’s a time traveller that they’re so interested in him. It’s nothing to do with his past before they got on that plane.

Clare’s panicking about leaving the island, but it’s unclear whether that means she’s becoming more human. In fact, NonLocke just pretty much gifted Kate to Clare, once Kate has done what NonLocke needs. But then, we saw a few weird moments between Kate and Clare a couple of episodes back, where it looked like Clare was softening on her old friend.

Oh, fuck, Mikhail! It’s weird him turning up and not being a complete badass. Keamy is a charming motherfucker for a psychopath.

There have been two moments of lampshade hanging in this episode so far – one where Sawyer tells NonLocke that some power limitation of his is crazy, and another where Miles thinks it’s crazy that Sun’s bump on her head has given her partial amnesia. It amuses me no end.

Richard wants to blow up the plane, and Sun, she doesn’t want that. OH NO! She shouts a lot in Korean. Nobody understands a word of it, but her intention gets through to them.

So Keamy isn’t just a psychopath, he’s also part of an elaborate plan to kill Jin. He is still a charming motherfucker, though. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Widmore, though. Come to that, we don’t know anything about Widmore’s place in the sideways reality.

Apparently abducting Jin has pushed Widmore’s plan forward by quite some time, and now he’s off kilter. He’s here to make sure that NonLocke doesn’t make it off the island. And the package is a who! A WHO! Oh my goodness!

But who??

Having a Rashomon moment in the sideways universe, which is fitting so close to Akira Kurosawa’s birthday, as we see/hear Sayid’s encounter with Keamy from Jin’s point of view. And it turns out that Sayid didn’t kill Keamy quite dead enough.

Those bullets hit Sun, didn’t they? Oh, fuck, of course they did. My guess is she gets to live but loses the baby. But of course at this point, who knows?

Oh, no, it’s killing me, now. I don’t care about Sun being able to write in English, I want to know who the package is.

Stubborn tomato! Oh, Jack, you’re much cuter this season, but you are still a giant fucking idiot. No wonder she isn’t the first person to tell you to leave them alone. And you shouldn’t make promises you probably won’t be able to keep. Unless, of course, you’ve no intention of keeping the promise, and it’s just some kind of Jacob-like manipulation!!

(Heh… he could have gone the other way and said it was a cheery tomato. DO YOU SEE? A CHEERY TOMATO!! Because cherry tomatoes are an actual thing that exists!)

Oh fuck, Sayid’s been sent on another Rambo mission, seriously? He is such a badass.

And there’s the man we’ve all been wondering about. No, not Faraday, you idiots*…

…Desmond! He has definitely been taken to the island against his will, or at least drugged, and he’s the package.

But what does it all mean???

Again, a fun episode, that didn’t leave me dissapointed, but I already know that a lack of real answers in it are going to cause frustration on the part of some of my fellow fans.

*I have just gone into a Lostpedia tailspin, and read that Daniel Faraday died when he got shot in that second-from-last episode of the last season. For some reason I’d got it into my head that he was left mortally wounded, and was still drawing breath when the bomb went off, but apparently I forgot heartbreaking final words, and eyelids being pushed closed, and everything!

(Spoilers, yes?)

More playing around with the flashback format? Actually, did we already see a snippet of Jacob visiting Ilana bandaged up in hospital at the tail end of last season

Richard telling us that they’re all dead and in hell again? The showrunners are having fun with that old chestnut this season.

Richard is being pretty petulant, and it’s probably no surprise that he’s off to find and follow NonLocke, but it does mark one of the most uncomfortable gear-changes in a character between episodes – only last episode, Jack had him almost turned around.

Hurley’s talking to someone in what sounds like Spanish? Huh. And is Richard, who is really Ricardo, Spanish? I wonder how this’ll play out…?

(Actually, it’s as likely to be any one of the number of other people who’ve died on the beach that Hurley’s talking to, I guess…)

One thing about the Lost flashes thus far is that they’ve been like Quantum Leap – they always take place within the characters’ lifetimes. I guess this one isn’t any different – it is Ricardo’s lifetime after all – but it is jarring to see an honest to goodness period piece in Lost.

And there you go – Ricardo is a killer too, albeit an accidental one. But he can’t be forgiven, so he’s on his way to hell… Wow, this is a real hard-ass priest taking his confession.

I wonder how many of the “good guys” in Lost killed before coming to the island… off the top of my head, Ana Lucia, Sawyer, Kate, Eko, hm. Feel like there should be more.

Fuck yeah Black Rock. There was me feeling all clever for noticing Richard’s comment a couple of episodes back…

[I was reliably informed this lunchtime that the internet has been buzzing with the possibility that Richard came to the island on the Black Rock since both first turned up. I felt a bit stupid hearing this, as I hadn't considered it, but now I'm happy to put it down to basic pattern recognition, rather than actual deductive reasoning, and feel better about it. As I recall, once we saw what the Black Rock was, anyone who had turned up on the island in some way that we hadn't physically seen ended up being linked to the Black Rock - with the most persistent rumour being that the Others were the descendants of the survivors of that crash.

That Richard was linked to it was, I think, an extension of the same notion - he's old, and the boat is old, therefore they must be linked - and actually I'm not convinced that we saw any more substantive reason why he was something to do with it, rather than the temple or the statue, before these last few episodes.

In other words, if you come up with enough theories blind, it figures that you'll cover the ones that actually pan out, as well as all the ones that don't.

Actually, that's a point... where the fuck did the Others come from? Am I having some kind of brain embolism, or do we still not know?]

And there’s that giant statue, too. Still in one piece. At least, before the ship got there…

Smokey!

So Richard encountered the black smoke before he’d even seen the island properly. Interesting… it’s the Other who let him live. I’m wondering whether this roughly coincides with that scene with Jacob and the Other at the end of last season – I can’t remember now, but they were talking about a boat approaching, and I think it was easy to assume that it was the Black Rock back then.

I’d kind of assumed that as a key player, Richard was someone who Jacob has brought to the island and groomed, in much the same way that he had the other Lostees – for some reason, I hadn’t expected him to encounter the Other first.

True to form, the Other used Ricardo’s wife to seed the con, about the island being Hell… and the Other is bringing it home, continuing the illusion that that’s where they are, held back by the devil.

This theme is one that keeps recurring this season: That the only way to kill either Jacob or the Other is by getting someone else to do it. It’s a thread running through the whole show – Jacob and the Other aren’t the only ones bound by it – Sayid has constantly been the tool of people wanting someone to die, but not wanting to get their hands dirty, and Ben Linus first made himself known in a scenario that saw Michael shed blood on somebody else’s behalf.

That scene where we saw the whole statue at the end of last season was literally only hours before the statue crashed and burned. Probably. If the Black Rock was even the ship that they were talking about, and Jacob hasn’t brought dozens of vessels to the island, on an approximately 6 to 7 year cycle, depending on syndication.

All of this has happened before, you know? Who knows… Maybe it’ll even all happen again.

Blimey… Jacob can actually kick ass when he wants to. He’s like Jack Bauer in the 1860s. He’s more like a powder-puff new-ager by the time our time rolls around. And he’s the one who brought the ship to the island. Wonder if that means he aimed it at the statue?

Heh. The internet is going to tell me that this episode answers all the questions, but so far Jacob is mainly talking in allegory. Still, he’s convinced Ricardo, hasn’t he?

I’ve found the good/evil God/Devil stuff has been adding quite a lovely thematic undercurrent to the show, but this episode is pushing it from subtext dangerously close to text. My personal feeling is making it too much definitively about Jacob as God and the Other as the devil – or even the other way around -  will cheapen the complexity of the show somewhat, but i am enjoying the ride so far.

Love the call-back to Dogen’s orders to Sayid in the Other’s orders to Ricardo – “You let him talk to you.” – beautiful. And the Other is a slippery tongued bastard.

Oooh, wow. Ricardo’s wife Isobella spoke to Hurley? That should have been obvious, but I didn’t see it, and it’s lovely.

Actually, was that the longest flash evar?

OH NO ISOBELLA ISN’T GOING TO KISS RICHARD THROUGH HURLEY, IS SHE? THIS IS “GHOST” ALL OVER AGAIN…

Oh, no, I guess not. That was much less gross than Demi Moore making out with Whoopi Goldberg. Almost sweet, even…

Isobella said “You have to stop the man in black. You have to stop him from leaving the island. Because if you don’t…”

And then the Other – or the Man In Black as he seems to be called most consistently – and Jacob are discussing their situation, and it’s tense and grave as befits it’s place in the show’s mythology.

And you know, I have to say, I’m locked in for the end of this show, and excited, and loving it – and I’m very grateful for all the years of awesome television – but…

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things that has always worked so well about this show has been the quite subtle mix of the real with the extra-natural with the super-natural… the first season was all about the very real situation of being stranded on an island, married with the obvious weirdness of the misplaced animals, the hatch and the beast in the woods – the unlikely but possible – and the outright supernature of dead relatives wondering around.

Later seasons took this further, pushing more into the realms of weird-science and metaphysics on one side, with the Dharma Initiative, and soft mysticism on the other, with the Others, but even then, the show-runners – smartly, I think – chose to frame it as the conflict between progress and science, and the natural world demanding more respect from its alpha species.

It’s telling that Jacob was only ever mentioned in passing – even when Benry invoked him, it was only ever rarely – and that things like the smoke monster were given little tells that meant they could pass for mechanical, or at least made. And last season, with Faraday as it’s mouthpiece and the majority of the action taking place around the Dharma Initiative, the real world, or even with the relatively science-fiction based conceit of time-travel – seemed headed toward this almost more rich and potent metaphysics-based narrative – where the incredible and the unlikely and the spiritual, the miraculous and the coincidental – and all the rich human and emotional stuff that happens as a result – were creating a strong argument for the innate beauty of quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

This season – and I know it’s dangerous to judge a show, especially this show, on half a season – seems to be taking a much more traditional tack, and this episode only consolidates that tonal shift. We seem to be talking about the gathering of two forces, behind two ideologically opposed figureheads, and the debate almost seems to have shifted to what those two sides are stand-ins for – is it Biblical? Or is it free-will vs determinism? etc – rather than the normal question when watching Lost, which is, of course, “is that really what’s going on?” (or, “are we ever going to see Evangeline Lilly naked?”).

Don’t get me wrong: I am totally on board if this season simply because the countdown to a final battle between good and evil, and watching the characters deliberate over which side to take has been fascinating so far. If all we get to see is how normal mortal people live with being pawns in the battle between Biblical entities, I will not be sad to be watching that TV. “Carnivale” never got to finish it’s take on that particular trope, and it’s going to be a while before I get to re-read “The Stand”, so a bit of that vintage Stephen King epic flair mixed with the show’s own polished aesthetic isn’t going to be unwelcome.

And I somehow doubt we’re headed for the full-on angelic intrusions we saw in “BSG”.

But if, the way it’s looking right now, the show discards some of it’s stronger elements to make for a tidy finish, it will be a shame. Not a deal-breaker, for sure. But still, all along, “Lost” has been one of those places where nothing was ever that simple, grey areas reigned, and science was weirder than religion, and in that way it’s unique – I think it netted a particular audience, some of whom (and possibly most vocal) were already institutionalised geeks, but many of whom came in from the soap dramas and more mainstream TV, and by playing with story elements that questioned causality, examined the ways which people impact on each other, and questioned such fundamentally held beliefs as those surrounding sociology, psychology, survival, revenge and duty, it gave that audience something to think about, when most other TV persists in telling them stuff they already agree with.

It encouraged people to think about big ideas, even if often it’s characters weren’t that good at considering them.

Losing that for the sake of giving some closure to the people who’ve spent every day since the third or fourth episode pining for “answers” would be a shame.

That said, just typing this, I can see a number of different reasons where going for the definitive and previously seen story trope of black hat vs white hat actually still fits in with many of the other favourite traits this show has – even if Jacob is a Jesus allegory, the questions about causality and personal responsibility still hold.

Anyway, so, good episode – I just wish it didn’t appear to so completely telegraph some of my greatest concerns for the show’s imminent final few hours!

It’s pretty cool, actually, because this one soon gets into a call-back to a familiar plot fragment that hasn’t been referred to in a couple of seasons. I much prefer it when they trust the viewer to remember this shit for themselves.

SPOILERS PERSIST!

It’s an incredibly fun wrinkle that Sawyer’s off-island alternate is buddied up with Miles – they are a duo that formed during what were arguably the best years of Sawyer’s life. This could add a lot of weight to the theory that what we’re seeing in the alternate is somehow a Nirvana for the Lostees – a bittersweet reward bundled up and hidden in NonLocke’s cryptic wording whenever he talks about going “home” or getting off the island. However, the show has relished – and even lampooned – the vague and shady afterlife undertones, while at the same time overtly flexing away from them when they get too pervasive – they skewered the notion that the island was somehow purgatory for the people who had actually died on the plane more than once – most notably with the faked sunk plane, and with Locke’s ghost-father’s outburst that later turned out to be ill-founded.

Non-Locke is a swell leader, as it turns out. Much easier for his followers to get behind than either Locke or Jack ever were. Interesting, considering those guys were normally telling the truth, and he was a big old liar.

Plus, you know, at this point he actually says that his people are going to be escaping the island in a plane – while sending Sawyer on a mission – and while it’s not beyond him to mislead, he’s generally much more likely to avoid saying anything definitive than lie.

I’m wondering whether there will be more reference to the fact that Locke’s father and the man who ruined James Ford’s life are the same person? I find it interesting, when Sawyer and Locke, or even NonLocke, are in a scene together, to think that in some ways they have the same father – James’ parents were the ones that died in that room, but Sawyer wouldn’t exist without Locke’s father’s manipulation.

Certainly, after saying that Dr Linus was the most different iteration of the legacy character in the previous episode, James Ford and Sawyer are even more distinctly different – though of course, when Ford says to Charlotte that there was a point in his life when he could have been either a criminal or a cop, it’s pretty much spelled out for us how things changed for him.

Mind you, LaFleur was a dry run for this aspect of James’ life, and it’s not an original notion that criminals and cops have similar skill-sets. We’ve seen this side of his character before.

Woah… Claire just totally whaled on Kate. And Sayid is just totally spaced out. And NonLocke just totally spanked Claire.

And while Sayid’s thousand-yard stare makes a lot of sense in the context of a fractured conscience soon after committing not one, but two, cold-blooded murders, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Claire’s meltdown happened with Sayid in the frame, but doing nothing. A few episodes back we were pretty much told by the show to think that Dogen was wrong in the assertion that Sayid and Claire were infected by the same evil. Now it’s looking like there might be something in it.

Huh, Desmond’s still in the credits. That’s a bit of a giveaway, isn’t it?

Also, it just occurred to me, and by just I mean when Charlotte turned up on a blind date with James Ford, honestly, where the fuck is Faraday? I wondered back in the first episode of this season, but then forgot. But now I’m wondering again.

Also, I wonder whether the sideways Miles can hear the dead, too?

Subma, subma, submarine!

Woah, sideways Charlotte… you were totally snooping through his private shit! I don’t think you get to take the moral high-ground… especially not with a hunka love like James Ford.

Oh. Apparently you do.

(Two awesome things about that scene – Charlotte accent manages to be all over the place just over the course of this one scene! And when Sawyer wants to make it up to a lady, he does it with a sunflower and a six-pack of beer. Because he’s fucking Sawyer, that’s why.)

Widmore isn’t writing anything on that bit of paper, you guys! Why would he be writing a report? It is just for show!

God, I love Sawyer. I honestly can’t tell whether he’s playing Jim Robinson or he’s playing nonLocke… He is that damn good.

Of course, this is Sawyer, so of course it turns out he’s playing everybody! With the possible exception of Kate. Because he luuurves her.

Actually, that’s odd… This episode seems to have the least closure in it’s flash-focus than almost any other episode in the series. Interesting choice, as it doesn’t leave cop Sawyer’s story anywhere final. Suggests they’ll be coming back to it somehow.

Benry:

Yes, yes, I know the rest of you are probably over calling him Benry, but I’m not even remotely tired of it yet…

There was a time not that long ago when an episode that started with Benry looking confused and terrified would have been both a quite appealing prospect – he was an ‘orrible individual, wasn’t he? – and a novelty bordering on an impossibility. One thing we’ve known about Henry Gale, since not long after his introduction all the way back in Season 2, is that he is always in control.

However, this season has shown us genuine growth and development in his character, with him taking a genuine knock with the discovery that Locke wasn’t Locke but Non-Locke, and that he had been played for a fool. Manipulation, after all, is the field in which Benry really made his name, and for him to be manipulated himself is unheard of.

The other thing that we learned over the course of the last season, of course, was that though he took greater relish in his role than some might, Benry’s driving motivation has been the protection of the island. It’s become clear that it isn’t just evil that motivates him. Though he’s a dick for the sake of being a dick sometimes, for the most part Benry does what he does because he believes it’s the right thing to do.

As we saw a couple of episodes back, in the alternate Benjamin Linus is a history teacher – working at the school that John Locke substitutes at – and after a bit of on-island recapping, this is where we see him. The writers have him talking to his students about Napoleon, and his loss of power, and it’s difficult not to see the deliberate comparisons that are being drawn between he and Napoleon.

Alternate Linus is kind of a sweetie, by all early impressions, and heavily put upon by an obnoxious headmaster, in sharp contrast to the version of the character we’re used to. Of all of the alternates, he’s the one who is most different from his island counterpart, but he’s also recognisably the same fellow we know. It’s fitting – last season, we saw Linus as a boy bullied badly by his father, until a brush with death left him with the role of island protector, and made him into the viciously pragmatic man we were used to. Of all of the characters, he’s the one most dramatically changed by the island, and that’s what we’re seeing in this alternate.

This is the world in which his father got to grow older and mellower, instead of Benry killing him.

So far this is the most cameo/coincidence heavy of the new episodes, with Arzt and Alex in prime roles. There’s also a delicious role-reversal in Locke encouraging him to take a more proactive role in his life.

(And I swear, it is an absolute pleasure sorting through screengrabs of Alex, trying to pick one out…)

Oh, stuff that’s happened while I’ve been going on about that – Miles exposed Ben Linus as the one who killed Jacob, and Ilana, inbetween tormenting Linus for his crime, told Sun that she and Jin were “Candidates” for replacing Jacob.

Ilana is such an odd character – she was introduced in a pretty low-key manner, but it now seems she’s involved with Jacob in a similar way to Richard.

Richard, incidentally, is leading Hurley and Jack through the jungle. He even almost explains to Hurley how he’s managed not to age, but stops at the last second. Richard seems pretty petulant about the whole Jacob thing, actually. He no longer trusts the guy.

Miles, on the other hand, is suddenly pretty fond of Jacob, from beyond the grave… and keeps sticking the knife in with Ben, tormenting him with the knowledge that Jacob had higher expectations of him than he thought. Pretty tactless of Miles, really – he tells Ben all this while Ben is digging his own grave at gunpoint.

This is an odd moment, actually – if the characters are to be believed, Jacob is speaking to both Hurley and Miles, now that he’s dead.

It’s funny that Arzt has turned up again – Richard takes Hurley and Jack back to the Black Rock, and that’s where we saw the end of Arzt. There’s also a reference to Nikki and Paolo, and that’s canny – the Nikki/Paolo episode was one of the few that featured Arzt prominently.

[Huh... just watching through it again a couple of days after writing the rest of this, and I think I totally missed the fact that Richard as good as says that he came to the island on the Black Rock.]

There’s been some theorising about whether Jacob is really the good guy and non-Locke the bad guy, or whether it’s actually the other way around, and there’s something in that, but it’s becoming clear in these last few episodes that the entity using Locke’s image, as much as it offers the choice of free will over determinism, seems to require the spilling of blood from all of its followers. That, to me, isn’t a positive sign.

The interesting thing is, after weeks of Jacob’s influence slowly diminishing in the wake of his death, this episode also sees a shift back toward him as a force on the island. At around the same time that Jack convinces Richard that Jacob may still have a plan – even following his own murder – turning Richard back from the brink of a suicidal lapse in faith, Benjamin Linus makes the choice between the easy option of killing once again, this time to escape from responsibility for his murderous actions – which followed his own loss of belief in Jacob – and to his surprise finds mercy and an invitation from Camp Jacob.

Off the island, the alternate Dr Linus also redeems himself, but this time it’s by not doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. The parallel is drawn between the two iterations again and again, because here, he sacrifices his own power and the greater good for Alex. Previously on Lost, of course, he allowed her to die because he believed he was protecting Jacob and the island. There seem to be two points being made, here: the Linus not affected by the island would rather give up his own hubris and power rather than make a decision that would hurt another person, and a world with Jacob in it is a world that’s bad for Alex.

It might not matter that Benjamin Linus finds redemption on the island, as it happens, because hark! A submarine! Bearing his mortal enemy Jim Robinson!

Another really good episode. Everyone does awesome work, but Michael Emerson manages to handle a completely different take on the same character, while at the same time dealing with some pretty significant but understated changes in the legacy iteration’s personality, with characteristically terrific skill.

Oh, and two other things that I noticed on a brief second watch. Two cute Miles moments, actually.

First, considering he’s been pretty much a comprehensive asshole since he turned up, isn’t this kind of cute:

And in an episode that did even more to cement the sense of continuity and place that I mentioned in an earlier post than any before it, with the return of the Black Rock, Arzt, and the references to Paolo and Nikki, I thought this was a nice touch:

Oh, Miles. Don’t ever change. You mercenary fuckbag!