BEWARE SPOILERS

My reaction at the end of this episode was much like how I responded to the beginning: wha– huh? That’s to be expected with Lost, but I’ve never been so confused. Did Locke really say they had to MOVE the island??

The writers have really restored my faith this season, revisiting a lot of very old arcs I was never sure would come back again, but now I’m wondering if things are getting a little too convoluted. We’ve waited eleven episodes (most of the season) to learn more about Jacob, and when Locke finally finds the cabin again, we get (big surprise) a bunch of new questions and not too many answers. The one thing I’m pretty confident about is that Jacob’s a ghost, but I gathered that more from the events of last week’s episode.

I am happy that we didn’t have to wait another episode before they came back to the ghost stuff– they set it up last week with Jack seeing his father in the future and Claire in the present, and that lead directly to what we had here. So here’s the big question: is Claire alive?? She’s certainly not acting like herself and wherever the baby is, considering how close we are to the end of the season and we know Aaron gets off the island, she’s probably never going to see him again. And she seems very content. I’m glad they finally decided to resolve the Jack/Claire/Christian thing, though I never thought it would be so twisted and weird. But again, I’m much more interested in knowing about Jacob at this point, and as far as they’ve stretched that, the reveal better be really fantastic.

I’m going to harp on the Desmond vision thing again because I’m afraid that mistake is worse than ever now. If Claire is dead or if she refuses to leave her father, she never gets in a helicopter! Desmond saw that in his vision last season and it’s important because it was what predicted that help was coming to the island. Not much of a prediction if whohe saw in the helicopter was wrong! And the writers are screwed on this one anyway because even if she does get in a helicopter, it’s been too long– none of his other visions took this long to come true.

Nice to finally get a Locke-centered episode this season. The flashbacks were jarring and nothing short of bizarre. It looks like the island has actually been in control of Locke fora  long time. One of the Others came to him as a kid– though I really didn’t understand that scene. Locke was supposed to say which items used to belong to him, and when he picked the wrong one, the guy was disappointed and left (can’t remember his name for the life of me but he told Locke in the present last season that he had to kill his father). Is it possible there’s some time travel involved here, like what happened to Desmond? Maybe the Other knew about the future and was hoping that somehow kid-Locke had memories from the future as well.

I realize that’s a leap, but the way Ben was acting this episode also makes me suspicious. In his episode a couple of weeks ago, he seemed very surprised to find himself in the desert in the future, and it looked like he might have transported from his room (where he went to control the smoke monster) to the future where he wreaked havoc and made Sayid work for him, then returned to the past just a split second after he left. I’m not sure if that’s what happened, but it’s the widely-accepted theory across the net at the moment (so I’m not taking credit for that theory at all). That would explain why Ben conceded this episode, telling Locke that his time is over and Locke’s has just begun. If he knows what happens in the future, he has nothing to lose by laying low and pretending that losing his daughter has broken him. What I’m getting at is this: maybe he’s not the only one who can time travel? It’s been established that it’s the consciousness that transcends space-time (at least it was for Desmond) and so maybe Ben and some of the Others figured out how to control that.

 And the guy who said he was from Oceanic and made the offer to Hurley in the future is the one who told Locke about the walkabout, presumably to make sure he got to the island. How does that guy fit into everything? Is he working for Whitmore or Ben or someone else?

Meanwhile, there’s mutiny on the boat and some guys want to kill everyone on the island. I’m still not liking all the mystery surrounding this. I don’t really know why they want to do this unless they have a directive from Whitmore, and that would be consistant with Ben’s line at the start of the season that the man who sent the boat would kill them all to have the island all to himself. If that’s the case, I don’t know why they’re treating it like such a giant mystery– they’ve set it up already. I also think Michael is headed toward some sort of a redemption and that he’ll join the regular cast again sometime soon.

The information came to the people on the boat that the doctor washed up on shore with his throat slit, but of course, that hadn’t happened yet. I wonder what would have happened if they didn’tslit his throat and changed the future… because the future for them is apparently the present for us. Suddenly we wouldn’t be able to trust anything that happened on the beach. Or perhaps it isn’t possible to change the future in this continuity. If that’s the case, I’d like it established soon. It looks like time anomalies are essential to this show so I hope a consistant science is decided on. That’s always mirky territory and dangerous to the whole continuity of a series when done wrong.

Again I wonder: why does Locke have to move the island? How do you move a whole island? And does this have something to do with all the time stuff? Maybe when it’s moved the people from the expedition won’t be able to get to them because the time field will be too big to cross through. Or maybe moving it will stop the time lag.

The plot thickens and my brain comes closer to exploding. Please share your thoughts!

For a moment, it really was nice to finally see “something nice back home,” but of course, we knew it wasn’t going to last. That’s the drawback to the flash-forward format. From previous forwards, we already knew that Jack and Kate don’t stay together even if there relationship looks promising for a moment. They have more chemistry here than I’ve ever seen between them– Jack and Kate both usually rub me the wrong way, Jack with his often-obnoxious hero complex and Kate who has to do the depressing, tragic and usually illegal thing, no matter what the situation. Finally, seeing them together raising Aaron, they were almost making sense. Of course, once Jack heard Hurley’s warning that someone was coming to visit him, he can’t just ignore his dead father’s ghost and try to live his life.  He has to immediately start drinking himself silly and almost become his father. *eye roll* I appreciate seeing the events leading up to his depression and growing the beard, and now I completely buy why all of that happens, but I hated suddenly liking characters I’ve been annoyed with for several seasons now, knowing that’ll all get yanked away again in twenty minutes.

Looks like Claire might finally get the big news about Jack being her step-brother. I never doubted the writers would get back to this eventually and I expected it soon, considering that if Aaron is about to get off the island, there’s a good chance she either doesn’t survive or gets left behind. But I admit, I didn’t call that she would be haunted by Jack’s father. I’m assuming there’s an important correlation to the present and future here that hasn’t been revealed yet.

I’ve speculated for a long time that Jacob has something to do with all of the “hallucinations” people have had in the show (Jack’s father, Kate’s horse, etc.). I’ve even mentioned the bizarre idea that Jacob himself is all of them. I think I’m probably wrong about the latter– the fact that Miles sees Jack’s father means he must be a ghost, since Miles has the ability to detect them. If that’s the case, he’s a far more important character than I ever expected he’d be. I still wonder if Jacob is involved with the ghosts somehow, or if he is just another ghost himself. The various ghosts we’ve seen so far could only be viewed by certain people, and Locke couldn’t see him in the cabin last season, so that’s a good clue. And this week’s coming episode focuses on Locke finding Jacob’s cabin again– hopefully this ghost idea is explored further. The one “hallucination” that isn’t a ghost, though, is Walt, as far as we know. Michael’s flashback a couple episodes ago seems to confirm that he is alive, or at least that he was the last time Locke “saw” him at the end of last season. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Why does Jack’s father’s ghost find him both in the present in the future? This episode confirms that Charlie really was a ghost and not a figment of Hurley’s imagination. So they can leave the island. I wonder why they do this. Or, is there something to what Hurley said. He claims that they never left the island, which I’ve suspected but kind of hoped wasn’t the case. If it is, it would make everything far more complicated and a little hokey– are the characters from the expedition not real? Have they been there the whole time? The creators have promised us it’s not all just in someone’s head or some lame cop-out like that, but even if the idea were clever, I’d feel a little cheated if Hurley was right.

I didn’t love the explanation that Jack just changed his mind about going to live with Kate and help raise Aaron. He seemed almost terrified of the idea when Kate suggested it during her flash-forward. I would have liked to have seen the conversation or had a little explanation of it, other than, “I’m glad you changed your mind.”

After I wrote last week’s review, I had another thought about the man in the casket from Jack’s first flash-forward last season. Could it maybe be Sayid? Maybe Jack and Kate learn he’s a traitor to them and working for Ben, and then something happens and he dies. He would be a good candidate for a character no one would attend a funeral for and that Kate might refuse to go see but Jack would. Any thoughts on this one?

The writers are doing a good job of positioning the characters where they need to be to get off the island soon, so I’m sure it will happen by the end of the season, if not in a couple of episodes. Any ideas on why Jack was able to get sick on the island while others have been cured? Will this be a trend in those that get off? Sun has to leave or she’ll die because she’s pregnant, and now Jack has proven that he can get sick on the island. Will Hurley get sick and that’s why he leaves? Or will different people have different reasons for leaving? I’d love to hear your own speculations– things are getting really interesting!

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan