5x03, "Jughead"

Now, then: that's better. They spent too much time explaining how this season was going to work in the premiere and too little time doing anything neat like they did tonight. It's also clear now how little I give a shit about the Oceanic 6.

*The only spoiler I'd known going into this episode, other than the title, was that the Oceanic 6 weren't going to appear at all. I didn't know why at the time, but that created a huge sense of relief. I'm just so bored with them, really. Once you discovered who The Six were exactly and once you saw how miserable they all were, it became clear they had to get back to the Island. Instead of being done in any sort of interesting way, it's this scavenger hunt by Ben because the Six are all fucked up in their own unique ways. For whatever reason that just makes for some boring television.

It's like watching a show entirely based around parents trying to drag their kids to the dentist. The kids really don't want to go, but you know for their own good they eventually have to. So there's a lot of running away and dragging back and on and on. I really want everyone gathered together again and just get it over with. The Island is just so much more fun than the real world.

*It was brought up to me last week that Ms. Hawking could be Farraday's mother. I didn't believe it since Farraday told Desmond she's at Oxford and the last we saw Hawking she was in Los Angeles. But now it's becoming very clear to me that not only is Ms. Hawking Farraday's mother... she was also the woman pointing the gun at Farraday's head for most of this episode. Sledgeweb has the details.

Do you know what's the most awesome part of that: the remote possibility we may see Fionnula Flanagan as a bad-ass wielding a rifle.

*I knew Farraday was going to say he loved Charlotte. I think its something they wanted to develop much more in Season 4 but due to the writers' strike couldn't. So they had to take big dramatic steps in that romance like they did here. Also: a geek like Farraday would of course believe that the strongest weapon he has is love. Awwww.

*So Desmond's kid is named Charlie. Interesting. We have a very solid foundation for LOST: The Next Generation: Charlie, Ji-Yeon, Aaron, Clementine and of course, their version of Locke, Walt. I really believe this generation of kids is going to be a very big deal eventually. Might we see them as grown-ups? Might the end of the show be this new generation crashing on the Island themselves, oblivious to how their parents and thus they are connected?

*Once a dick, always a dick: Charles Widmore is a piece of work. Seeing him as an Other really puts an extra spin on his backstory though. How did he go from humble Other grunt to one of the richest most powerful men in the world? And how did he leave the Island? Was he exiled? Was he supposed to be the Ben until Ben came around? All very interesting stuff. However the thing that most gets me is this:

*In a way you can say that Ben killed his own daughter. Think about it like this: Locke did not shoot Widmore because he said Widmore was "one of his people." He only believes that anyway because Ben made him the leader of The Others. If Ben hadn't done that, Widmore would've been shot in the back and died there in the jungle and never sent the Freighter people and Keemy to kill everyone on the Island.

It's stuff like this I think we're going to see a lot more of. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse like to talk about Lost as a mosaic, with a lot of missing pieces that they'll be filling in as the show proceeds. Except now we're not just seeing plot holes get filled, but we're seeing linear time becoming irrelevant toward causes and effects. It's not that one thing must follow another. It's that everything is holding together across time regardless of what came first. In that case, who is to blame for something, whether it is good or evil, becomes a blunted question. And I think as the show wraps up by the end of it we won't see anyone as particularly good or evil and everyone as just... BEING.

Next week: "The Little Prince"