It's that time... LOST Season 5 Thread!

It's been a decade since I read it so I might be missing something, but yeah, that's about all I figure it could mean. Hypothetically, if The Incident was Jughead going off, that would explain the chem suit that Desmond was made to wear during his early days in the Swan, but I'm not sure it would make sense with the island in general--I'd imagine an atomic blast would destroy quite a bit of the landscape and wildlife for quite a few years, unless the island was able to regenerate itself in a similar fashion to the healing powers it has on people, which is a pretty interesting concept. I still feel strongly that the Oceanic survivors are back in time for a purpose--Sayid feels his was to kill Ben, but maybe it's something bigger than that, maybe they're all there to attempt to stop the Purge or the Incident from happening. I think that fate vs. free will argument is the heart of Lost, and this is Jacob's attempt to stop the universe from course correcting itself, which is quite an epic concept.

I think it was a pretty okay episode. better than some of the latest ones, what with them getting back to the non-linear storytelling. But for them to call it "He's Our You?" That seemed a little overly-needlessly-dramatic. I love that william Sanderson cat, but what was he in the show for, 8 minutes, maybe? And I don't see him becoming that solid of a major character to justify titling and entire episode after him. I dunno, maybe they just wanted something that would link back to sayid since it was his episode but just seemed lazy to me.
Speaking of Sayid, I was half-expecting them to kill him off last night. Since they had that bit with Ben telling him how he was finished with his work and whatnot, but then I figured that, naaah man, they wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of bringing him back to the island just to kill him off in his second episode back. But then I remembered that this was Lost and NONE of the deaths on it have ever been very sensible or "impactful?" i guess is what i'm trying to say. Except Locke's.

Meh. Not bad, not as good as last week.

I liked the fact that is was a flashback. I wasnt too thrilled with what was revealed in the flashback though. I do like that Sawyer's last words to Kate were not about her, but about his daughter, that was nice. Everything else just didnt matter to me too much. Oh, Kate gave Aaron back to his grandmother? Oh my god, what a shocker!

As for the stuff on the Island... again, big deal. I feel like it maybe could have been all done half an episode, not a whole one. I liked the fact that Miles and Hurley were used to vocally express the fans confusion about time travel, though it was a little deus ex machina. Hurley seems to, time and time again, be the one that takes the voice of the viewer. First more profoundly when summarizing 4 seasons of Lost to his Mom in 30 seconds last season, and then last episode and this one... its a little blunt and over the head...

And obviously as shit gets more and more complicated Sawyer and Miles and Jin and Juliette are going to be found out. That's just the way it is.

I am glad the Hostiles are the ones who save Ben, and I actually kind of like the intentionality behind Kate and Swayer knowing, in that moment, what their answer of "Yes" meant. That said, I dont like that he will conveniently forget all of this. Lame. I wanted adult Ben to, as he was being tortured by Sayid, remember freeing Sayid from prison as well as being shot by him. I liked that better. I liked him turning all super crazy and evil because the one person he trusted turned on him with no reason. Plus, I wanted his sorry ass to die and then come back to life. For no real reason, except it would have amused me. I do like that he was brought into the Temple for healing, though. And who were the two names that the Hostiles told Richard Alpert that he should check with? The two he said that, "I dont answer to them?" The second one sounded like "Widmore," so we know who that one is, but what was the first name? (Stupid Lostpedia, why have you not the answers yet? And why is my download of the episode only 40% complete?)

The little reveal clip with Ben and Locke at the end was lame. We all already knew that Locke was alive and sitting at Ben's bedside and that Ben most likely didnt know Locke was alive. While I see why they needed something to end the episode with a pop, that should be the way they open the next episode, not end this one.

Next week's episode, though, looks great. He came back to the Island to be judged? By Smokey? I love it. Crazy he may be, and a self serving liar, but he has some integrity. He broke the Island's rules, and those are what matter most to him. So he is going to go and face the consequences.

...
"Richard--you shouldn't do this without asking (?)Healey(?), and if Charles finds out..."
"Let them find out. I don't answer to either of them."

ellie. eloise hawking

also. "You do realize, if i take him, he will forget all this." ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
kate leaving aaron with her grandmother is grounds for telling jack "You can never ask me that question again!" ...>cough< Bullshit.
By FAR the worst episode they've ever done since nikki and paulo.

Ahh. Ellie. Nice.

Both reveals are major cop outs. And super lame.

I don't want to know what the smoke monster is. with these kind of "explanations" or reveals, or whathave you, it is setting up to be unavoidably lame and the show was much better when you didn't know what was going to happen.

yeah, after that episode i'd be perfectly fine with them just leaving it at the smoke monster is a "security system" and that's it.
I'm still a little extremely PO'ed at the show for the way they handled all that. I hope on the next podcast they get their feet held to the fire.

I'm so over this whole 70's Dharma trip. I can't wait for Desmond and doc brown to return them back to the future.

yeah it was interesting and a fun little narrative twist, and unexpected... in as much as i did not expect them to just get stuck there and live there for so long... now my interest therein wanes. though i dont anticipate they will be returning to the "present" until near the end of the season...

obviously i am one of the bigger lost sympathizers 'round here, but i dug tonight's episode. I thought it was actually pretty freakin' awesome.

Maybe in part because I love Ben. You just never know what is going on. Like the explanation he gave Locke for killing him... that sounded like BS to me. Though it was also perfectly plausible, especially given the way Ben looks at things. I liked that it was a Ben flashback, I like that they showed more of a younger Ben, and I liked that they confirmed that it was Desmond that roughed Ben up.

I also liked that they gave us the back story of Ben and Charles, or at least more of it, enough to understand some sense of what is going on but still left it open for more. They also played it well with Widmore's story, throwing in the comment about impregnating someone off Island, just so they didnt have to deal with all the fans getting whiny about "What about Penny?". Well played. And there is still so more that can be told there, but nothing that HAS to be told.

What year was The Purge? Rousseau came to the Island around 1990, right? So the Ben that kidnapped Alex would have been around 30 years old or so, especially seeing that Ethan, born in the late 1970s looked to be 12 or 13 or so. So was this before or after the DI was wiped out? If before, then how did Ben sneak away from the DI to spend time with the Others? If after, why were they not yet living in the Barracks?

Not too many mysteries left open. Or, rather, not too many new ones. The only real *new* question is, WTF are the newbies talking about, the shadows of the statue? I guess other new questions, though quite probably ones that arent going to be answered, is why didnt Ben know about the lower level beneath the temple wall, and then the lower-lower level? Seems like something he should know about, having been in charge for as long as he was... And, additionally, new questions about the relationship between Smokey and Jacob are up in the air now, I guess. The Smokey v. Ben scene was done well, though, I thought, and Michael Emerson really shined in this episode and that scene, highlighting himself as one of if not the best actor in the cast...

Thoughts?

This was the second episode of the season where I was like, damn, this is an Emmy-worthy performance (the other being Locke's earlier episode). I dug it quite a bit, especially after just watching last week's episode and being so meh about it. I dug the Charles/Ben stuff, and seeing more of the Monster is always good. Overall, great episode, and I hope they keep it up.

Also, shooting Cesar in the chest? That came out of nowhere. And was absolutely hilarious. A sawed off shotgun from only a few feet away has some kick to it, his whiny ass flew like a rag doll!

I like how Ben set him up for it, too, although for the life of me I can't figure out why, except to maybe demonstrate two things--how much disregard he has for human life, and how he vents his frustration when he's not in charge of a situation. Either way, it was a good scene.

It did kind of show that the whole "i only do what is necessary to protect the Island" routine is pretty thin... i suppose you could argue that in his experience it is best not to leave enemies standing, get them out of the way before they get you, but still...

Podcast Highlights:

*The Finale has been shot, and is in the editing process right now, and will be completely edited in about 2 weeks.

*Ben is obviously a master manipulator, but between the two stories regarding John Locke that he told, one to Locke and one to Sun, the one to Sun is *probably* more reflective of the truth (duh).

*Desmond isn't "fine," and he was in fact shot. And since he is not on the Island, he won't heal super quickly, so who knows what is going to happen...

*The next episode is a bit of levity, considering the seriousness of this Ben episode and the intensity that is going to exist once the finale starts up. So, I dont know if it is a joke episode or not. Hopefully not another nikki and paulo.

*The 100th episode (or 100th hour) is not next week but 2 weeks after (with a episode re-cap episode in-between), and is called "The Variable"

Also, in case I didnt say it before... FINALLY we will learn more about Miles, or at least see his "talking to dead people" ability in action again!

so has Daniel been off in the jungle crying for three years? whatta puss.

So next week's episode is a Hurley episode?

nah, they said daniel left. they mentioned that when jack and co. showed up, that daniel said such and such before he left. didnt say how or when or why he left, just that he left.

even though the producers are calling it as a temporary relief from the tension, i dont think it is going to be a hurley ep. i dont remember the preview entirely, but it had a lot of miles in it. i am thinking it might be a miles episode, and the flashback that we are going to get will all be during the last three years on the island with the DI. so we might well see Daniel next episode, if that is the case. I guess talking to dead people is comic relief?

hmm. gotta disagree with you guys. This episode was Ok, but I'm still steamy about last week. I feel like they just threw in the smoke monster to distract us from how they are more and more making asses of themselves unraveling the plot.

Desmond beating up Ben. Ok, that wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but I can live with it as a "twist." Admittedly I had forgot all about Ben saying he was going to kill Penny.

Widmore wanted to kill baby Alex. ugh Ok. It doesn't really make much sense, other than to give Ben a reason to hate him (having her shot in the head worked well enough for me, I don't know about you.)

But Widmore was exiled from the Island because he left and then came back, to which Ben supports by claiming that he broke the rules because he couldn't leave and come back either... but it's Ok for Alpert to go hang out with baby Locke and to go recruit Juliette. Lame. And it's more of the same thing of "revealing" what we already knew.

Clearly the implication was that the Island chose a new leader in Ben, just as it later would do with Locke, and that is OK for me. Just tell us that like you did in the subtext of the scene, and we would be peachy. Instead they have to pander to the stupid audience that wants it spelled out and so far that way has not been very satisfying for me.

There definitely seems to be a difference between leaving the Island to conduct Island business (which we saw Alpert, Ben, and Mr. Friendly do, to name a few) and leaving the Island for personal pleasure, which in some way is like cheating on the Island... Widmore did the latter, proving he wasn't worthy to remain the leader and hence him being banned...

I'm not buying that whle bit with Ben taking Alex that way either. It's a cop out to what we've already been told.
yeah, yeah, yeah you can say that Danielle is batshit crazy and just misspoke all you want. Horse pucky! She had it together enough to live there for 16 years.

I'm convinced now that they had no idea where they were going to go with this show all through the first season and were just throwing all this mysterious shit out there, then around the season 1 finale they finally sat down and started putting together a complete story and all the little things they don't feel like explaining and working into their newly constructed framework, then to hell with all those viewers that want to know.

And it started with the title cards, explaining the timeframe, for the stupid people; and now it's going on to more pandering to those people that don't want to use their brains to work things out. Guess what's next? what are there, 20 episodes left between this year and next? At least 10 of them will be devoted solely to the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle to rake in the stupids.
Ugh. We used to say "Fuck you, Lost!" out of frustration for never answering questions. Now it's "Fuck you, Lost!" for selling out and going more towards a shitty standard television program.

i do like the idea of the smoke monster being condensed into a big puddle of muddy water until it's drained out. (Something hot enough to evaporate it into a steam further under ground?)

the plot did not advance at all... but I enjoyed the episode all the same.

you know one of the things i've been thinking about ever since hurley popped up in the past on the island was his old mental ward bald headed friend. The one he saw when he was "crazy". Wouldn't it be interesting if he actually meets him in the past and sees him die then. Then that would mean he wasn't crazy and the guy was actually someone real that is just dead and talking to him.

Just a thought.

and agreed the last few episodes aside from the Ben episode haven't been amazing. But I did like the Hurley and Miles combo last night.

Yeah, definitely a minimal amount of plot development--the Losties are getting in over their head now, and now we know where Daniel's been--but even though it was pretty obvious who Miles's dad was, I liked this episode a lot. Miles's backstory was sufficient, seeing the construction going on around the island was good, and that bit where Miles kidnapped in the van was great--that's the most interesting/suspenseful thing they've done all season. My only real beef with it is that I don't really like the way the writer's use Hurley's character. Since season 3 or so, he's only ever used as comic relief or general filler or dumb-audience-catcher-upper, or all three.

Do you know what lies in the shadow of the statue?

Nothing, because it's just a foot.

What do you guys make of this new group of people? Someone suggested that they might be Dharma descendants who were off island during the purge.

I think they're rad. If they're anti-Widmore, it's strange because they seem very much anti-Ben, too, although they suggested there are only two sides, and obviously Ben/Widmore is the obvious thing. Maybe Jacob is anti-Ben, too, but Ben is just super clever and Jacob just can't shake him or control him.

I couldnt agree with you more, RandomStranger, about this episode. I dont think the plot moved too quickly or in any sort of leaps or bounds, and with the exception of the van scene there were not any reveals that were really too unexpected... What did we find out? *Miles is Chang's son and was born on the Island *The decision to bring Ben to the Others is going to bite Kate and Sawyer in the ass *They really were digging a pit and the electromagnetic anomaly killed someone without them knowing what was happening (what a crazy way to die, huh? Man, I have a lot of fillings, it would be like a mine went off in front of my face) *Not only were they already building The Swan before the discovered the anomaly (so what was the point of it before they discovered the crazy electromagnetism?) but they were building on the other side of the truce line, in Other territory

I will say, the Daniel thing actually mystifies me a little bit. So, where was he? He ended up on Island in the 70s with the rest of the survivor bunch. Then Miles makes a passing reference about how Daniel explained how the whole time travel thing works before he left. OK, that's fine, so he left, cool. Now he is back, and he was in the mythical "Ann Arbor," where everything Dharma seems to come from. Was he working for Dharma while away? Did he come back to help his friends? What the hell is going on? PLUS, we can assume that the scene we saw in his flashback, of him working construction in the Orchid, has not happened yet, because we saw the state of construction the Orchid is in, (although we dont know how long ago he left, I suppose, t might have only been like a month) but if he has returned to the Island as a scientist/specialist, and even gets a fancy schmancy black Dharma uniform, how does he end up in a construction jump suit in the basement of the Orchid with Chang not recognizing him?

I liked Miles back story, I though it did justice to his character and helped show why he is the kind of prick he is. Man, hearing dead people all the time would suck. It would suck goat balls. The easiest way to cope would probably be to turn off your capacity for true empathy with other living people and just exploit this gift, otherwise you go crazy with it. (The flip side would be to become super altruistic, I guess, but maybe the whole "I grew up without a Daddy" soured Miles's chances of that). I thought the answer to the 3.2 million was lame , though. OK, so he asked Ben for exactly double what Widmore offered him. That's fine, I get it. But it seemed that 1.6 million was just as arbitrary... so it wasnt an "answer" to why he asked for 3.2, it just muddled the issue... more likely than not it has no meaning at all...

Dude, seeing Denny (sorry, I dont know his character's name and that is what I call him in my head) kidnap Miles and ask him the question was freaking rad.

I also agree that Hurley is used too much just as comic relief. I enjoy him more when he is involved in a serious arc, and there are comic results just by his nature. It just seemed, in this episode especially, that he was just there to counteract Miles's gruffness. Though as soon as he asked how to spell "bounty hunter" I knew that he was writing "Star Wars," which is pretty hilarious, and I also geeked out when he made the whole analogy between Star Wars and Miles and his dad...

As for who the folk in the van are... I dont think they know about Ben. Unless they're being manipulative and dont want him to know what is going on, they would have said something to him... If there were on his side they would have obviously spoken up. They see things in black and white, it seems, son if they were not on his side they would have done something to incapacitate him. We dont know if Cesar was one of them or not, but he seemed genuinely won over by Ben. So I think they have their own agenda, which in part lines up with Ben's agenda (aka get rid of Widmore) but may not line up with the larger picture of Ben's agenda (always do what is best for the Island). However, I like the idea that they are all kids born on the Island in the late 80s who our Losties interact with before leaving, and tell them they need to come back in the future for whatever reason...

And I still am thinking their is a nice little bomb called Jughead under the statue. True, we think the statue was may have been built before the 50s, but all the same... Jughead. I also think that everyone is totally wrong about the consequences of an atomic explosion on the Island, especially due to the Islan's bubble. Maybe it is Daniel who tells the Island kids that they need to come back and set the bomb off?

you know one of the things i've been thinking about ever since hurley popped up in the past on the island was his old mental ward bald headed friend. The one he saw when he was "crazy". Wouldn't it be interesting if he actually meets him in the past and sees him die then. Then that would mean he wasn't crazy and the guy was actually someone real that is just dead and talking to him.

Just a thought.

and agreed the last few episodes aside from the Ben episode haven't been amazing. But I did like the Hurley and Miles combo last night.

I think this would be a great way for them to get back into using Hurley as an actual character. Have that "Dave" show up and Hurley realizes that he's been talking to dead people from before he even knew he was.
Only trouble is, he's been there three years now. I'd imagine he's run across everyone that's there.
I guess they could pull a "new recruit" coming in on the sub or even have him turn out to be an Other.

Something else i thought while watching that last night, I hope they end up explaining why, when miles talked to that one dead kid with the little dustbuster thing, when he came back downstairs the picture frames had changed.

Hurley has only been back on the Island for a few days, not more, he was off Island back in Santa Rosa for 3 years...

i forgot that last night was a clip show until it started. lame.

yeah, i did too until like an hour or so before. Not to be jumping on their shit still, but it wasn't even a very good clip show. So much of this season has just been kind of filling in the blanks anyways, it just felt like here, we're going to highlight all the blanks we filled in.

Something that did remind me last night, that bugged me a few weeks ago and i just forgot about it, was they need to address why exactly they even needed to come back to the island. The old broad made it seem like the very existence of the planet depended on them getting back.
But Locke and them made it seem like they needed to go back so everyone would stop dropping dead (even though he never bothered explaining that was happening to them for whatever reason.) But what would have happened had they all dropped dead? The island would have just gone on like it always had been.

Why do the two things have to be mutually exclusive?

Maybe if they never went back to the Island, the Island would never have re-situated itself in time. If the Island kept skipping in time then maybe it would create some sort of spatio-temporal tear in reality that would spiral out of control in such a manner so as to entirely alter the conception of time and space as we understand it on Earth...

Granted, as we have understood it it was not the Island moving but rather the Losties on the Island... but I warrant that they could construct a narrative in which any sort of consistent alteration to the normative timeline would have ramifications of greater magnitude than initially conceived...

Telling the O6 that they would be saving their friends would rope them in (hypothetically) more quickly than telling them that they are saving "the world," which would be both too abstract and too massive to conceptualize. So, while not saving their friends equates to not saving the world, it was more prudent to emphasize the deaths of their friends...

Wow. The last couple episodes of the season are going to be amazing, if this episode was an indicator. Sucks about Faraday, though--he was a great character, though I hope the island or Alpert saves him.

I just saw the episode... having just watched it today (Friday afternoon) because my week was lost to studying for a Sanskrit final (which I aced, thanks).

I am surprised less people have commented.

I agree, RS, it was pretty rad. I liked the fact that a major character died. It was sad that it was Daniel, though... earlier in the episode, I think during the flashback with his mother right after Widmore had visited him, I was thinking how great of an actor Jeremy Davies is. But all the same, I hope they don't save him, for two main reasons - firstly, they cant make it a habit to shoot people at the end of an episode and then have them living again at the beginning of the next episode. Lame. Second, it diminishes the fact that Eloise sent him back, knowing it would be his death, at her hands.

I like that they finally are letting them change time. Rad. Or, perhaps, maybe change time. Still, glad they finally brought up... what if Farraday has been wrong?

Overall I thought it was a great episode. A great set up to the 3 final episodes (or final 3 hours), and a good 100th hour. For once I didnt want to hit Jack in the face when he spoke, which was cool.

This episode brings up a lot of questions regarding my earlier post, about the fate of the world and the Losties return to the Island... what is game is Hawking playing?

I need to think about it a bit more, and I am about to listen to the most recent podcast, which will undoubtedly spur some thoughts.

Argh! Just wrote a lot, and the forums ate it. But the long and short was that the writers had always planned on Miles being Chang's son, and just because some viewers figured it out right away they didnt change it, they just had to take more care in how they reveal it... And that it is difficult to discern how to reveal things that dedicated fans already assumed but not everyone may have figured out.

This got me thinking. Most of my disappointments have been because the reveals were only confirming things I already assumed. Does this mean the writing isnt clever enough, as it should be outsmarting me, or does it mean that I should stop analyzing the show and guessing what is going to happen next to allow myself to be surprised? Are the reveals less grandiose in scope than previous ones, or am I expecting more from them due to my own magnified pre-understanding?

I thought they handled miles/chang thing pretty well, even as it became more and more obvious. But there's just been an awful lot of the revealing "because we got to put it in the show for canonicity's sake" type of stuff lately.
I was hoping they'd at least give us how daniel talked his way off the island. Last we seen em he was all nutty. Did he just go up to percy whetmore and say "oh by the way, i'm a superphysicist with knowledge and ideas far beyond what you have so you should send me off to your home base so i can learn them."
stuff like that and the whole Ben "Oh by the way he'll forget all this happened." stuff is getting a little too deus ex machina for my tastes.
pls if they don't at least give a hint as to what's up with bernard and rose by the finale I'm quitting this show cold turkey.
At least show us them living on the beach with sayid or something. maybe they've even had a kid of their own in the meanwhile. something. i don't care what, just something!

*A fan asked a question about the Dharma member Phil, and asked as to if he might be saved... and they said that after next week's episode everyone might change their opinion of Phil...

*A writer said that the "Ewoks sucked" comment was lame and needed to be rectified, and they pointed out that the moon of Endor and the Ewoks were not Lucas's original plan, the original plan involved the Wookies home planet, the planet Kashikh, and as an amazing final battle with a lot of wookies would be a LOT cooler than a battle with teddy bears.... So Hurley wanted the original plan, with the wookies. Not the teddy bears. And this took over two hours of argument in the writer's room. Which is somewhere between super awesome and super dorky. Though the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Meh. Rather boring podcast.

ummm it's Kashyyk! duhhhh!

and i just remembered that Daniel was the one running the camera in that comic con clip with Chang. SO he'll either turn up alive somehow later or they'll pull another bullshit answer out of their ass.

Seriously... No one? Nothing? I dug that episode...

I liked that Daniel was in fact dead. I like that Jack is going a bit crazy, and Kate isn't supporting him. I also like that Sayid made a come back, in a big way, when it was most convenient. I like bad-ass John Locke, I am a fan. I am excited about the finale. I wonder how the "Do you know what lies in the shadow of the statue?" crew are going to play into that.... We know that Lapidus is in the episode, as per the teaser...

Also, will we see Bernard, Rose, and Vincent?

Other thoughts?

However, a problem...

What was the point of The Swan station, if not to contain the crazy electromagnetic energy? They release the energy in the process of building the station... but all we ever see the station being used as is a place to push the button to gently and safely release the energy they disrupted. Sooo... what was it supposed to be for BEFORE they went and f'ed everything up?

I loved the episode. All the interpersonal dynamics were perfect. I honestly thought for half a second that Kate had been shot, which made me giddy, but even so, she's been a better character these last two or so episodes. I still want her to die, but I think she's actually doing things that make sense and that build tension, rather than doing dumb shit that annoys me. I like Sayid being back. I like Locke taking charge, though I don't know why he'd tell Ben he plans to kill Jacob, regardless of how fucking awesome that is. I love love love Locke telling Alpert about Locke in the forest with the bullet wound--totally amazing. I love that the island is, apparently, anti-Jacob. I'm pretty sure The Incident is the bomb going off, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense yet in my head, time-wise. It seems like it could be one of those self-correcting moments--if in the real world The Incident was something else, and that incident was never made to happen because of their actions, then their actions take its place and thus causes a similar effect to occur. I love whats his fuck, Radzinski? His character is interesting because we're supposed to hate him like we hated whats his balls from last season, the mercenary who shot Alex, only in Radzinski's case, he's actually doing something perceived as good. I love Faraday's mom's tits. I really dug the Miles/Dr. Chang stuff this episode. I'm pretty sure Sawyer and Juliet know, from the moment Kate stepped on the sub, that they're never going to get off the island. I love Dr. Chang being so much smarter than Hurley in that quick back and forth questioning. There's probably a million other things I love about this episode, but that's enough to start with.

Glad I am not alone. Hurley saying there was no Korean War, and the subsequent expression, was amazing. I do like the idea that The Island is anti-Jacob. Makes sense to me. I mean, why else was there the chalk line around Jacob's original cabin? And if The Island is telling Locke what to do, such as when Alpert needs to meet his past self, surely it is telling him to kill Jacob, or at least not telling him not to...

Another annoying thing, though... How does one exactly set off a hydrogen bomb from the 1950s? Does Jack have a friggin clue? Does he think all the answers are in Farraday's notebook? Because I just saw them swim a whole lot underwater, and I didnt see any baggies, so either that notebook is unreadable or we have a continuity error...

Also, Eloise said they are underneath the Dharma compound, in The Tunnels. Where is this in relation to Ben's Secret Secret room? Or, is the secret-secret room not built until after the Purge, when the Others take over Dharma-ville?

Let's assume our heroes do not set off the bomb for a brief moment, and they dont change the future. Whatever goes down between Dharma and the Hostiles, it has to settle down... because Ben has to be living in a somewhat calm Dharma situation when he kills everyone in the Purge. So, maybe the Hostiles lose somehow? I mean, the Radzinki we see, the one who told Sawyer to draw a map, that is in fact the Radzinski from The Swan, right? The one who was drawing the invisible map and who killed himself? Or am I getting all confused? (Lostpedai confirms that I am not confused, the one and same Radzinsky).

Wow, a great episode. And even without a flashback, I enjoyed the weavin of the two storylines, I thought it was well done, especially as the seemed to pivot (in the narrative structure) around Alpert, as he is the constant character in the timelines, which was nice...

FYI, the season finale is titled The Incident.

In any case, bring it on. I am even considering watching the recap thingy that starts at 8, just to get in the mood.