Beware the Spoilers

This episode has already answered some of my questions from last week, the biggest being whether we in for a whole season or more of flash-forwards. Apparently not, since this time none of the future was revealed and instead we saw the pasts of not one but FOUR new characters, all of whom were hand-picked for their individual talents to investigate the island. Now that I’ve had more time to think about it, my guess is that the Oceanic Six gets off the island sooner rather than later, that the rest of our characters stay on the island rather than dying (most at least) and that the present will eventually meet up with the events in the flash-forwards. After that, the Oceanic Six, or at least some of them, will all decide as both Jack and Hurley have, that they shouldn’t have left the island and they’ll find some way to get back. I’m pretty sure the flash-forwards are not very far into the future– two or three weeks tops. This episode gives us a working helicopter and at least Jack, Hurley, Kate, Claire and her baby, plus two others we can speculate about will get into it before the season is over. How Hurley gets in it is anyone’s guess: he’s with Locke right now and gave that stirring speech last episode about staying on the island because of Charley’s warning. Oh, and Claire’s with them at the moment, too. I also still think Sawyer is possibly one of the Six, and he’s with Locke too.

Before I get into the rest of this episode, let me also update a couple of things I said last week. I was mistaken about Claire’s baby– Aaron can’t count as one of the Oceanic Six any more than Ben can, because he wasn’t born yet when the plane went down. Which means, counting the baby, it’s probably seven who get off. Ben still could be one of those who leave (just not a member of the Six) and since the expedition came for him, that’s looking more and more likely to me– he could also still be the guy Jack goes to see in the coffin. I take back what I said about Locke– if these flash-forwards are only a couple of weeks later as I’m predicting, the writers wouldn’t kill Locke off. He’s too much of a key to understanding the island. I now think he doesn’t get off. I also think Sawyer is a candidate for the guy in the coffin since no one goes to the funeral, but that only works if Kate gets in a big falling out with him before hand, because of her line, “why would I have gone to the funeral?”

These new flashbacks were unusual to previous ones because, with the exception of the season one finale, the flashbacks usually stick to a single character. They also served to answer questions (and, of course, ask a couple of new ones) rather than just establishing new characters. I approve of this a lot, because combined with Hurley’s flash-forwards from last week, we the viewers finally know some things our characters don’t. Namely, that the same guy in the future who makes Hurley an offer to be sent to a better facility and falsely claims to work for Oceanic is the same one who sends this new expedition to the island.

I expected it to take several episodes before we knew why rescuing Jack and his people wasn’t the expedition’s primary mission, but happily we got it right away: they want Ben Linus. Why? We’re not sure of that yet, but I’d guess it has something to do with the fact that he killed everyone from Dahrma and because whatever mysterious organization that sent this expedition wants to know what he does about the powers of the island. The big thing about them we don’t know is who their working for. I speculate they could be the rest of Dahrma. After all, the entire Dahrma project couldn’t have been on-island. And, the bones of a Dahrma-tagged polar bear were found in Tunisia in a flashback this episode. Plus, wasn’t Desmond receiving supplies from Dahrma when he was in the hatch? I loved the polar bear, by the way– that helped affirm that the show will still deal with Dahrma and that there’s still some mysteries with them to solve.

Now let’s address the ghost hunter, Miles. I don’t love that Lost has suddenly made it blatant that ghosts exist in this universe and that there are people who can contact them. Sure, we’ve had things like Claire’s fortune teller and Desmond reading the future, but all of those supernatural things have been so shrouded in mystery, it’s been hard to tell the nature of any of them. That’s made it hard for fans and critics alike to label Lost as definitely science-fiction. But now, we have ghosts and a guy who probably just has a natural gift for talking with the dead. That immediately seems to slap the sci-fi genre on Lost to me. But then again, there is that smoke monster…

But the ghost hunter could be extremely important because he may be there to reveal what Jacob is. Given this new development, I’m guessing Jacob’s a ghost, but I have no idea whose ghost. I also think it’s quite possible that Jacob has been every hallucination everyone has ever had in the series (Jack’s dad, Kate’s horse, etc.) Remember that Ben saw his mother on the island when he was a kid, and now he’s in contact with Jacob for some reason. I’m pretty sure the hallucination thing will get cleaned up this season.

By the way, Locke puts a gun to Ben’s head and point-blank says, “What is the smoke monster?” He doesn’t answer, but he does reveal that he knew about the expedition because he has a man on their boat. I felt like the show was coming right out and saying, don’t worry everybody, we’ll explain the smoke monster eventually. I loved that. And Ben always has something up his sleeve even when none of his people know where he is, he’s tied up, and he’s bleeding everywhere. I think he went with Locke for a reason and he’s got a big plan for escape. He may or may not get off the island, but he’s certainly not going to get killed off any time soon.

The other really important thing this episode revealed was why everyone off the island thinks the flight 815 survivors are all dead. In the flashback of the helicopter pilot (who very interestingly was originally supposed to pilot 815), the pilot claims that the remains shown on TV of the 815 pilot can’t be him because he’s not wearing his wedding ring. All of those theorists who swore the survivors were all in hell (like Locke’s dad thought) or purgatory probably hate this episode because it seems to imply that the “plane wreckage” and “survivors” that were found off the island were a hoax. The man who sent the expedition seemed to know there would be survivors on the island. So did this mysterious organization, who very well might be part of Dahrma, fabricate these remains itself? If so, why?

Next week, Lost will be revealing a new member of the Oceanic Six. I think they’ll probably give us flash-forwards of Claire, which isn’t much of a reveal at all since Desmond’s vision already clued us into this. If you have any predictions of your own or if I missed something terribly important, please drop a comment!

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 10:14 am and is filed under Capt Logan, Lost, Sci-Fi, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.