Lost: You (still) want answers?

Tonight's "Lost" is the only repeat of the season ("Ab Aeterno," the Richard episode), so I figured I'd use the opportunity to re-ask a question from the start of the season: which mysteries will you be most disappointed if they aren't answered by season's end?

And to that I'd now add this: based on how this season has gone, and how some mysteries like the whispers have been explained, have your expectations for the final episodes changed?

Lost, "The Last Recruit": Harmonic convergence

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I need a moment...

"So nice to have everyone back together again." -Smokey

Last week, I expressed some concern that Lindelof and Cuse had waited too long to get to the Desmond portion of the season, not just because I think his presence (even if largely in the background and unexplained) might have spiced up the sideways stories, but because I worried we had spent so much time on narrative dead ends or seemingly inconsequential stories that there wouldn't be enough time left to properly resolve the stories of both the season and the series.

"The Last Recruit" put many of those fears to rest, reminding me that even when Darlton seem to be dragging their feet within either an episode or a season, they generally have a plan for what to do when it's time to start moving quickly.

For the first time since the premiere, we didn't focus on any one character or pair, but rather bounced from person to person, story to story as everyone began to come together, both in the real world and the sideways one. We got payoffs to a number of arcs and/or mysteries - Smokey admits he was posing as Christian Shepard all these years, Jin and Sun are finally reunited, Kate makes peace with Claire - and some high-caliber acting from just about everyone in the ensemble. (And if I've done my math correctly, the only castmember to not appear was Nestor Carbonell, since Richard is off with Ben and Miles in the real world and has yet to appear in the sideways universe.)

In fact, because "The Last Recruit" was largely devoted to moving various chess pieces into position on the board in both universes, there's less to deconstruct and puzzle over here than usual, so instead I want to point to some of the stronger emotional moments of the hour, in no particular order:

• Since Desmond had his moment of revelation at the end of "Happily Ever After," Henry Ian Cusick has been playing the character in both universes with a look of serene confidence, but here he got to (superbly) play a much sadder note as Desmond listened to Sayid explain what he asked Smokey for in exchange for going to the dark side. Desmond knows about doing crazy things for love, and he also knows far more about what's going on in both universes than anyone else does, and he feels so sorry that Sayid has let himself become a monster for no reason. (Also, as with last week's fall down the well, I have absolutely no concern about Desmond's future until we actually see his corpse - and maybe not even then.)

• While Alt-Jack's relationship with son David didn't do much for me back in "Lighthouse," their scenes had greater weight here now that we seem to be heading towards a point where the sideways characters have to sacrifice their universe so that the real one can survive and Smokey can be defeated. (That's my operating theory this week, at least.) And that means not only do some characters like Locke and Libby and Ilana have to realize they're going to die again, but it means Alt-Jack is going to have to deal with saying goodbye to the son who shouldn't exist, just as they're starting to get along. And while I'm not a Jack fan in general, I do not envy the man the choice I assume is coming.

• Desmond and Penny eclipsed Jin and Sun as the "Lost" couple whose happy ending I root for the most, but it was still nice to see the real versions of those characters finally get back together for the first time in almost three years. (On the other hand, if the only point of Sun's temporary loss of English was to show her love for Jin restoring it later, they needn't have bothered. Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim played that moment so well that no additional garnish was needed, and all it did was distract me with thoughts of, "So we wasted several episodes on this because...?")

• As I've said before, the narrative style of the show means we often won't see certain characters paired together for months or even years at a time, and that can occasionally rob some urgency from their stories. Sun and Jin suffered from this a bit, and with Jack and Sawyer separated since the season's first couple of episodes, I worried that some of the heat over Juliet's death would have gone away by now. But as soon as they were on Libby's boat together, it all came back - with the added wrinkle of Jack having taken over Locke's role as the one who believes in the power of the island (and who isn't a sucker), while Sawyer is now the Jack-like leader who just wants to get everyone the hell off, grand design be damned. Good stuff from both Matthew Fox and Josh Holloway.

• Because Jack never found out Claire was his sister until after he'd left the island, some Jack/Claire interaction was a long time in coming, and we got some in both universes. I particularly liked how, after the initial shock (well-played by Fox), Alt-Jack mainly seemed amused by the idea that Christian had left him with a long-lost half-sister.

All in all, a good episode - not mind-blowing, but necessary.

Some other thoughts:

• Lapidus still doesn't get much to do, but here he was the recipient of two great Sawyer lines, first with James describing him as looking like "he just stepped out of a Burt Reynolds movie," and then with the nickname "Chesty."

• So ultimately, was Alt-Desmond's plan in running over Locke to give him a near-death experience akin to the one that clued him into the real world's existence, or was he just trying to put Locke in a position to meet up with Jack?

• More bleed-over from real world to sideways world, as Alt-Sun is terrified to see Alt-Locke being wheeled into the hospital next to her.

• Was I the only one who flashed on Larry David doing the stink-eye lie detector gag on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as Smokey tried to figure out if Sayid really killed Desmond?

• So, why was Alt-Sawyer in Australia? He seemed too jolly in "LA X" to have murdered Frank Duckett the way real Sawyer did, but he's trying to hide something.

• Assuming I'm right that Sayid didn't kill Desmond, and assuming Claire is sincere in burying the hatchet with Kate, is Hurley right that characters with the "sickness" can be brought back from the dark side, just like our pal Anakin?

• Nice of the writers to give Ilana a role in the sideways world now that she's kaput in the real one.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Everybody Loves Hugo": Throw the Scot down the well

Still off through the end of this week, but I can't help myself from writing about "Lost," so a quick review of tonight's episode (along with some thoughts on where we are in this final season) coming up just as soon as I'm well enough for a fajita field trip...

"Whoa. Dude." -Hurley

Well, we're clearly cooking with gas at this point in the season. Desmond's return has goosed the narrative stakes in both the sideways universe and the real one, two of the three island factions have finally come together(*), stuff blew up left and right(**), Des and Locke are trying to kill each other in the two timelines, and the sideways world again was used well to bring back a character whose time on the show felt like it came to too abrupt an end in the real timeline.

(*) Albeit in an episode that saw the creation of another faction in the Richard/Ben/Miles group, since groups on "Lost" are forever picking sides and walking off, going all the way back to when Jack took half the Oceanic survivors into the caves back in season one.

(**) Albeit with explosions that continued this season's trend of unimpressive CGI work. Whatever cuts ABC's made in the show's budget the last couple of years, the digital FX department has definitely been a big victim.

My fear, though, is that it's taken us too long to get to this point.

In the early years of the show, a "Lost" episode and a "Lost" season tended to be constructed the same way: an exciting beginning, then a lot of narrative throat-cleaning, and then an exciting finish. Once Cuse and Lindelof got permission to set an end date and knew what they were moving towards, seasons 4 and 5 became much denser, both from week to week and over the course of each season. Season 6, on the other hand, has felt like a throwback, not just with the return of old characters like Charlie and Boone and, now, Libby, but with the way that we're heading into the home stretch with material that it feels the show would have been better-served to deal with sooner.

Though some of the early sideways stories were entertaining through the sheer force of personality of the actors/characters being spotlighted (Locke, Ben), there was nothing all that interesting about the sideways world itself until last week. By making Desmond aware of the wrongness of the world - and introducing other characters like Charlie and Faraday who also recognized this - we finally tied that world to the one we care about, and created some urgency to our visits to LA. But I'd have rather see this happen a few weeks into the season and not now, not only because it would have given greater purpose to some of those meandering flash-sideways stories like Jack's son or Jin's amazing adventure in the freezer, but because it feels like now that we have a sideways story arc (Desmond tries to nudge the Oceanic passengers into realizing that this world isn't right), the resolution of it is going to feel rushed.

But Cuse and Lindelof have earned some trust over these past few years. Even if I didn't love a lot of the first half of this season, I want to believe that they know just how much time they need to tell the remaining story, that even if "What Kate Does" hasn't retroactively gotten better, that we're heading towards a finish close to what a series this great deserves. Because I don't want the season to turn into one big dead end like Ilana ultimately was.(***)

(***) Even in death, Ilana amounted to little, as Arzt beat her to that particular punchline by five years. The Ajira crew ultimately added about as much to the series' larger mythos as the tailies - Richard or Jacob's ghost could have very easily explained the candidate thing with just as much detail as Ilana ever offered - and the tailies at least gave us Libby's romance with Hurley and Mr. Eko and his Jesus stick for entertainment value.

And in the meantime, Desmond's actions, as well as the resurrected Libby's awareness of her other too-brief life, gave Hurley's sideways story some juice, along with giving Jorge Garcia another chance to show he has far more to offer the series than comic relief.

In sideways world, Hurley's a man who seemingly has everything (his version of the happy ending deal all the island folk apparently got) but is incredibly lonely. In the real world, he's lost so many people while standing on the sidelines that he once again asserts himself and takes a surprising leadership role on the island. (And Jack, finally after all these years learning that he can't fix everything, seems okay with playing Hurley's sidekick for once, in a nice role reversal and good moment for the character.)

Garcia had a lot of good moments in this one, but my favorite came early on, when he tells Ilana that Libby was "murdered," and this tone of pained disbelief comes into his voice as he says the word. One of Hurley's most recognizable traits is his ability to discuss the most ridiculous events of the series in the most matter-of-fact tone, but with his delivery of that one word, Garcia makes it clear just how much this one particular event continues to rock his world, years later.

Libby's return didn't explain what she was doing in the mental hospital in the real world, and I suppose that's one mystery I can live without them explaining. But I'm hoping we'll get more of Cynthia Watros in the coming weeks, along with more Dominic Monaghan and Jeremy Davies and even Ian Somerhalder. Because if alt-Desmond's mission is to bring an end to sideways world so the real world can be saved, a bunch of people are going to have to accept that they're going to die again, and there's a lot of good material to be mined there - assuming there's both time and available actors for that.

As for the Locke/Desmond mutual attempted murder game going on in both timelines, I'm not assuming either real Des or alt-Locke are dead just yet. Desmond's fall down the electromagnetic well is one of those classic comic book-style "if you don't see a dead body, you don't have a dead character" moments, and alt-Locke is still breathing (and looking remarkably like Locke on the ground after his father threw him out the window in "The Man from Tallahassee"). I am curious, though, if alt-Desmond has a specific reason for targeting our poor, self-actualized substitute teacher - perhaps recognizing that damaging Smokey's host body in the sidways world hurts him in the real one - or if alt-Des is going more by instinct, and somehow knows in his gut that the man with John Locke's face has just tried to hurt him.

Anyway, we'll have more time to speculate on all of that once I'm working full-time again (and less sleep-deprived), so in the meantime, some other thoughts:

• Couple of notable guest stars this week: Samm Levine (from my beloved "Freaks and Geeks" had a brief appearance as the Mr. Cluck's employee who recognizes Hurley (and I thank the "Lost" producers for giving him more dialogue than Quentin Tarantino did in all of "Inglourious Basterds"), Bruce Davison reprises his role from season two's "Dave" as Dr. Brooks.

• So the whispers were the voices of all the souls trapped on the island because of the actions they committed there while alive. On the one hand, that's not a surprising answer; on the other, that's sort of the risk Cuse and Lindelof face in giving us answers to questions like that at this late date. After six years of speculation, of course most of us are going to have come up with an idea like this to describe the whispers, just as I'm sure the identities of Adam and Eve will wind up being something that's already mentioned on Lostpedia. But by tying the answer to a character moment - Michael asking Hurley to apologize to Libby for him - the revelation merited more than a shrug.

• I swear, every time a character with a gun talks about getting in an outrigger (here it was Richard), I turn into Millhouse in "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" whining, "When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!?!?!?!"

• Another possible "Lost" spin-off: a game show called "How Do You Break the Ice with the Smoke Monster, Anyway?"

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Happily Ever After": Not Desmond's life

Well, a brief window has opened in my family time schedule, and we're about to find out if my brain is operating at enough candlepower to adequately discuss tonight's "Lost." A briefer-than-it-deserves review coming up just as soon as I accost a man in a dressing gown...

"There's always a choice, brother." -Desmond

It's not an epilogue-in-advance.

Clearly.

The whole epilogue theory, which I began noodling with as much so that I could pretend that the flash-sideways meant something as because I believed in the idea, was pretty concretely disproven by "Happily Ever After."

(Apologies if the next few paragraphs read like complete gibberish, but between my recent sleep deprivation and the usual mechanics of a "Lost" story arc, it's inevitable.)

Instead, it appears that some event - perhaps the detonation of Jughead, perhaps something we've yet to see - has rewritten the timeline, in a way that has given nearly every character what someone, somewhere, thought would be a happy ending for them, whether it worked out exactly or not. Locke has the love of Helen, Ben has a relationship with a living Alex, Jack overcomes his daddy issues, etc., etc., etc. The dead rise up and have more palatable existences (Daniel Faraday, pushed by his mother to become the world's greatest doomed physicist becomes Daniel Widmore, pampered by his mother into becoming a musician who wants to combine classical music with the works of Driveshaft). Not all of it quite works out - Sayid is still a soulless killing machine who can't be with Nadia, Kate's still a fugitive (albeit hanging with the mother of her son from the real timeline), Sun's gutshot - but enough of it does to suggest this wasn't designed as a kind of monkey's paw existence.

In fact, everyone is supposed to be so happy in these alternate lives that they'll never notice how much the universe has changed, or the cost that was paid to attain these lives, or what evil - Smokey, presumably - is busy running amok while Jack's busy having a catch with his son and Sawyer and Miles are acting out unproduced "Nash Bridges" scripts.

And while some people are capable of recognizing the artificiality of this other universe (if that's what it is; for all I know, this could be The Matrix, and Jack and the others are all hanging in suspended animation inside a global cloud of black smoke), the only one capable of sharing knowledge between his two lives is Desmond.

Desmond is "special." Desmond knew the universe wanted Charlie dead well before the universe finally won that battle. Desmond can travel back and forth through his own lifetime, "Quantum Leap"-style. Desmond can survive the time travel sickness because he has Penny as his constant, and can alter the timeline when no one else can. He is, in fact, cool enough that for the first time in forever my "Lost" gag reflex didn't rise up when a character was offered an explanation and declined(*).

(*) That's part Desmond coolness, part that Cuse and Lindelof's "Happily Ever After" script pretty strongly implied what was up, particularly in the scene where Desmond comes face to face with Eloise, who in a universe where she didn't kill her own son wound up marrying Widmore and giving his name to their son. In every timeline, she knows more than everybody else, and here she doesn't even have her son's time-looped notebook to explain it all.

So now there are stakes to the sideways stories. Desmond exists in both realities, and is working a plan in both. Now we know that the sideways world is tied to the one we know, and that it needs to be stopped - that, like the Oceanic Six had to go back to the island, all of the important Oceanic 815 passengers have to accept that this is not their beautiful house, their beautiful wife, etc. That knowledge doesn't retroactively improve dull sideways stories like "What Kate Does" or last week's "The Package" in the way that we might have hoped, but it does make the sideways world matter moving forward into this last rush of episodes.

And with Desmond back in action, and working towards a reunion with his beloved Penny in at least one timeline (if not trying to woo her in the other), I'm pumped to see what comes next.

In the interests of my REM cycle, a few other thoughts and then you guys fire away:

• We see Widmore's scientists have a rabbit on hand (named Angstrom, as a tip of the hat to John Updike), just like Dr. Chang did in the infamous Comic-Con video where the island duplicates the rabbit. At first I assumed the idea was that Desmond was the only man who didn't exist in both timelines as separate entities, but perhaps not. Perhaps Darlton just like rabbits, given how many contexts they've place them in.

• I liked how much of Alt-Desmond's life mirrored what we know of him from the real world: still protecting Charlie Pace, still dancing to Charles Widmore's tune (albeit willingly here), and now it's Penny who's running the steps at the stadium. Eloise says "whatever happened, happened" (but says it to the one man on the show who proves that axiom's not always true). And I literally got goosebumps when we flashed from alt-Charlie's hand to the "Not Penny's boat" scene."

• Like Daniel Faraday (and Keamy, and Bakhunin and many others), George Minkowski comes back to life in sideways-ville, here a talkative limo driver instead of a talkative radio operator.

• So is the sound effect used to transition into the sideways world supposed to sound like an MRI machine?

Lots more of the episode to unpack, but I'm losing steam. We'll see what state I'm in next week - and also whether next week's episode inspires me to power through the fatigue the way this one did - but for now, vis a vis "Happily Ever After," what did everybody else think?

Lost, "The Package": Ticking clock... BERSERKER!

A review of tonight's "Lost" - and a rant about the ABC gimmick that tried really damn hard to ruin it - coming up just as soon as my brain takes a little stroll...

"Some people just aren't meant to be together." -Keamy

Okay, we have lots of things to discuss about "The Package." First, though, allow me a paragraph or three to be pissed off. Really, really, really pissed off that ABC saw fit to clutter the bottom corner of the screen with a "V" logo and a ticking count-down clock to point people towards tonight's return of that show.

On-screen clutter has been one of the scourges of television over the past decade, as networks think nothing of putting annoying flashing billboards all over their shows, sometimes for other shows, sometimes to remind you of the name of the show you're already watching. I remember writing a column way back in 2001 bitching about how NBC interrupted an episode of, I think, "West Wing" in order to use a bug to promote a new show called "First Years." I wrote that I was so irritated that I hoped "First Years" would fail just to prove the gimmick wrong. "First Years" did fail, quickly, but clutter has only gotten worse. I manage to avoid a lot of it because I watch so many shows on screeners (had I been forced to watch "Men of a Certain Age" on TNT, rather than on DVDs, I likely would have felt much more harshly about that show, knowing how much TNT loves its clutter). I, like the TV executives who approve crap like this, don't always watch TV the way regular people do (which is no doubt why said executives don't think it's a bit deal to approve it), so I manage to avoid the worst of the worst. (Matt Groening once said that he imagines a good chunk of people who buy "Simpsons" DVDs are doing it so they can see the episodes without all the clutter Fox inserts into the broadcasts.)

But because I watch "Lost" live like the rest of you, there was no way to avoid it, and it was ridiculous: between the large red "V" logo, and the ticking clock, it was impossible to not notice it, virtually ever moment it was on screen (which was everywhere except right before or after a commercial break), and in at least one case the stupid clock obscured the note Sun was writing to Jack. Well-done, ABC. Really freaking well-done.

Again, I accept that I've lost the clutter fight, but there are some shows and moments that should be above this junk. As Mike Schneider wrote, "this is "Lost." The final season of "Lost." It's sacred ground. You don't clutter the screen during one of the show's final, pivotal episodes. Or you piss people off."

Count me in among the pissed, and the only thing keeping me from going full-on ballistic is the fact that "The Package" was middle-of-the-pack "Lost" - an episode that's necessary because it moves a lot of story points along but isn't that thrilling in and of itself. Had they pulled a stunt like this during "Ab Aeterno," a shoe might well have gone through my flatscreen.

After last week's extended Richard flashback, the sideways universe returns, and once again we find out that things are different but in many ways better for two of the characters who have declined to take Smokey's side. Alt-Jin and Alt-Sun aren't married, but she's still carrying his child, and their relationship is much warmer without the stress that Jin carried as Mr. Paik's son-in-law. Of course, Keamy does try to kill Jin on Paik's orders, and Sun winds up getting shot during the battle with Bakhunin(*), but until that point, they're happier than they were in the real 2004, which certainly goes along with my epilogue-in-advance theory, where the people who go against Smokey get a happier ending than those who follow him. (Though at the moment, the only sideways we've gotten that qualifies as the latter is Sayid's.)

(*) And Bakhunin, of course, gets shot in the right eye, because some things have to remain the same from timeline to timeline. By the way, think we'll ever get any Patchy backstory from the real timeline - i.e., was he really a Dharma guy who flipped to Ben's side, or something more complciated? - or is that one of those questions Darlton don't want to/have time to answer?

Still, good as Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim are together - and this is the first episode where they've shared extended screentime together since the end of season four - this wasn't one of the more compelling sideways stories. Maybe, like the others, it plays better in a few months after the secret of this universe has been unlocked, but here it was a charming love scene and then a lot of Keamy hamminess. (I really liked Keamy's return in the Sayid-ways, but seeing him in so much of this episode made me realize the less-is-more nature of Kevin Durand's performance, you know?)

As for the island material, we at least got that great moment where Widmore shows Jin the pictures of Ji Yeon(**), and we got a bunch of questions answered: Widmore says he's working to stop Smokey (when there was some ambiguity in his reaction to Sawyer's belief that this was his goal in "Recon") and has a plan that involves the island's electromagnetic anomalies (as mapped by Jin and the rest of LaFleur's crew back in the '70s), Desmond is revealed (as many of you guessed) as the "package" inside the locked room on the sub, and Smokey needs Jacob's remaining candidates to get off the island(**). And we got a reminder of what a good duo Jack and Sun were back in the day. (Seriously, that final scene was the most likable the real version of Jack has been in many, many seasons.)

(**) Daniel Dae Kim absolutely killed that scene, and between that scene and Jack's promise to Sun at episode's end, I think I may be just as invested in seeing the Kwon family get their happy ending as I am on guard that Desmond, Penny and baby Charlie sail off into the sunset.

(***) And because the list on the cave wall differs from the list in the lighthouse - specifically, in that Kate's name is not crossed out in the lighthouse - Smokey appears to be making a big mistake in giving Claire permission to kill Kate once she helps them reassemble the remaining candidates.

It wasn't all thrilling, but there was at least a sense of the story moving forward, my man Desmond is back in play, Sayid's soul is gone (but he looks really cool coming out of the water at night), and Richard finally has a plan for Team Jacob, even if Jack seems determined to not let it happen. There are a lot of agendas at play now, a lot of weird moving pieces, and if "The Package" didn't get my blood racing (though the stupid "V" clock got it boiling in spots), it at least has me interested to see how what happened tonight plays into the bigger picture.

Some other thoughts:

• I wonder if there's going to be a larger plot point to Sun's temporary loss of her English, or if it's there to create a parallel to season one, where when the Kwons finally reunite, Jin will speak English and she won't.

• It occurs to me that Jack and Sawyer now seem to be occupying the same moral space on their respective sides; seeming to play along but really only concerned with getting their friends the hell off Craphole Island; imagine what they could accomplish were those two crazy kids to join forces!

• So part of the "cork" properties of the island seems to prevent Smokey from using his powers to get off it, but doesn't keep him from hopping on an outrigger to row over to Alcatraz. Hmmm... Seems an odd loophole. (And, once again, someone with a gun takes an outrigger but does not shoot at Sawyer's season five group. Sigh...)

• Nice to see the return of the weird indoctrination/rave room that Karl was locked in during Kate and Sawyer's escape from Alcatraz in season three. If that place was just another Dharma experiment, as Zoe claimed, why exactly would Ben stick Karl in there? Just as punishment for annoying him?

Finally, a programming note: I'm due to take a couple of weeks family time starting either next week or the week after (a couple of pieces are still being moved around), which means I may either skip over two of the next three episodes, come to them very late, and/or touch on them very briefly and then open up the conversation to you. Sorry for the inconvenience, but the timeframe only has so much wiggle room, and can't wait until after this season. I promise that as soon as I see each episode during the time I'm off, I'll get up some kind of quick post; I just might not see each one right away.

Ticking clock-related rants aside, what did everybody else think?

Lost, "Ab Aeterno": The man behind the shackles

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as you fetch me some blankets...

"You've suffered enough, Ricardo." -Isabella

It's been almost three years since "The Man Behind the Curtain" aired and viewers saw that Richard Alpert doesn't appear to age. In the ensuing time, the question about why he doesn't has shot to the top of the "Lost" Mysteries That Must Be Solved list - basically the opposite of "where did Jack get those bitchin' tattoos?" - and anticipation built and built for the Richard flashback episode we all knew we'd get sooner or later(*).

(*) Or, at least, we all knew it once CBS canceled Cane and the "Lost" producers were able to lock down Nestor Carbonell's services for these last two seasons. Imagine how annoyed we'd all be if "Cane" had succeeded, and not just because "Cane" sucked.

In other words, "Ab Aetern" had a lot to live up to - maybe more than any episode we're going to get this season other than the finale itself.

And it absolutely lived up to my expectations.

On one level, it answered a whole bunch of "Lost" questions, some long-standing, some relatively recent but crucial:

• Why doesn't Richard age? Because he asked Jacob for that gift to avoid eternal damnation after Jacob couldn't resurrect his wife or absolve him of his sins.

• How did the statue crumble into a four-toed foot? The Black Rock smashed it to pieces on its journey into the island.

• How did the Black Rock wind up in the middle of the jungle? Because Jacob whipped up one hell of a storm to make sure it landed on the island and couldn't leave.

• What's this game that Jacob and Smokey are playing? Jacob - while playing jailkeeper to the evil that Smokey represents (with the island as "the cork in the bottle") - is trying to prove Smokey wrong in his belief that man is inherently prone to sin, and so brings people to the island to perform in one morality play after another.

• If this whole series has just been one elaborate game between two immortal god-like creatures, why should we care about any action the characters take? Because Jacob is a hands-off deity who believes in free will for all those he brings to the island (as he told Ben before he killed him, "You have a choice"). So whatever actions Jacob took on the mainland to steer them here, what we've seen Jack and Locke and the rest actually do on Craphole Island has been entirely their own doing. (And that in turn takes away one of my big concerns about this final season.)

But if "Ab Aeterno" was just a checklist of answers, it would have been a fairly inert outing (as I've found some previous mythology-intensive episodes like season four's "Cabin Fever").

What made this one a highlight not only of the final season, but of the series' entire run, was what made "Lost" so compelling at the beginning, before hatches and fertility experiments and time-traveling Scotsmen and the rest of the mythology (which I really do like): it was both a great character piece and a white-knuckle thriller.

Carbonell (who once upon a time was known only as The Guy With the Funny Accent on "Suddenly Susan") owned this episode just as much as Michael Emerson did "Dr. Linus" or Terry O'Quinn did "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham." For three-plus seasons, Richard's been the serene, all-knowing man of mystery, and Carbonell was superb at showing both a cracked, suicidal Richard who has decided he actually knows nothing, and then at showing the very human man he was before Jacob made him immortal. Like "The Constant" (another "Lost" all-timer), we had a time-spanning romance, and if it wasn't one with quite the happy ending that Desmond and Penny got (for now), at least Ricardo finally got a proper goodbye from his beloved Isabella, and her love renewed his belief that he chose the right side of this conflict all those decades ago.

And if we had gotten no relevant answers but every minute of Richard's harrowing ordeal shackled below decks in a ship full of dead men(**), I still would have found "Ab Aeterno" to be an immensely satisfying hour.

(**) There's long been a mutual admiration society between Lindelof, Cuse and Stephen King, and as I watched Richard struggle to free himself of those chains, my thoughts started to turn to King's "Gerald's Game."

Like I've said and said and said, I care about "Lost" answers much less than I care about being entertained. "Ab Aeterno" offered both answers (or, in some cases, important clarifications) and entertainment in spades. If I wasn't so tired, I might pull a John Locke and declare my need to watch it again, immediately.

Some other thoughts:

• I also don't think it's a coincidence that an episode this good was also the first of the season to do without the flash-sideways (and to bring back the more familiar "whoosh" sound effect for the flashbacks). Not only was Richard's story so compelling that we were able to spend the majority of the episode in an uninterrupted flashback, but we know going in that everything we were seeing has relevance to the story we've been following all these seasons. The sideways probably have relevance, but we don't know what that is yet, so those stories tend to succeed or fail almost entirely on whether we have pre-existing affection for the spotlight character. The flashback was not only a ripping yarn on its own, but something that requires no explanation at a later date to be fully appreciated.

• Smokey adopting Locke's form gives the producers an excuse to keep Terry O'Quinn employed, but I have to say that it was nice to see Titus Welliver again as Smokey Classic. He has such great screen presence and darkness and was a very convincing trickster devil in his scenes with Ricardo. (I remember him turning up in a small role as an "ER" doctor in an early "NYPD Blue" episode and asking myself, "Who the hell is this guy?" I was not surprised to see David Milch kept employing Welliver, until "Deadwood" finally raised his profile enough that he now works regularly on shows like this.)

• And the flashback structure also gave us a long glimpse of Mark Pellegrino as Jacob. Interesting to see a much crankier Jacob in his first meeting with Ricardo; this sure seemed like the first time (or first time in a long while) that Smokey tried to break the rules and use a pawn to try to kill Jacob. And note that Smokey's warning to Ricardo about not letting Jacob say a single word is exactly what Dogen told Sayid about Smokey a few weeks back.

• "Everyone's dead and this is Hell" was one of the earliest fan theories about the nature of the island, so it seemed a nice touch for Richard to spend so much of this episode (first in the past, then in the present) believing it to be true.

• As one of my Twitter followers pointed out, it's been a big week for Tenerife on TV. First Walter White talked about it in his speech in the "Breaking Bad" season premiere, and here it's the home of Ricardo and Isabella before her untimely death and his imprisonment.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Recon": The middleman

A review of tonight's "Lost" - with special guest commentary from Ken Tremendous - coming up just as soon as I say the magic word...

"Who's Sawyer?" -Miles

I've been spending a lot of space these last few weeks trying to develop a working theory about what the flash-sideways mean, and I'm going to do that again here in a bit. But the thing is, when an episode is as entertaining in both realities as "Recon" was - and, really, as "Lost" has been for the last several weeks - my urge to question, analyze and theorize takes a decided backseat to my desire to relax and enjoy.

It's helped that we're on a streak of three episodes showcasing characters and actors I like, and those of you who haven't wanted to see Jack paralyzed by a spider bite and buried alive since at least season three tell me that "Lighthouse" wasn't as bad as I insisted it was at the time. But leaving that episode and my allegedly irrational hatred of Jack aside, this recent batch, and "The Substitute," and "LA X" have all managed to give us interesting alternate glimpses of the characters we know, while at the same time slowly but surely moving the island saga along.

We can debate whether or not the flash-sideways scenes matter, in that we're spending an awful lot of time on versions of the characters that, so far, have no obvious connection to the ones we've been invested in for the last 5+ years. And certainly I've felt a little frustrated at times. But I have to admit that there are moments - and there were a lot of them in "Recon" - where those scenes are just so much fun that I can wait a little longer for an explanation about the deeper meaning of it all.

There was some joking on Twitter after the episode aired that the flash-sideways are threatening to turn the show into "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase." The difference being, I would actually watch a Ben Linus version of "Yo, Teach!" And I would absolutely watch a buddy cop show about Miles Straume and James Ford(*).

(*) Has enough time passed that the "Cop and a Half" title could be recycled? "Wunza straight arrow! And wunza former con man trying to stay on the straight and narrow! They are... Cop and a Half!"

The opening scene in the flash sideways turned the comparable moment from season one's "Confidence Man" neatly on its head, and the idea of Sawyer as a cop, in a universe where Jacob apparently didn't influence him, isn't that far-fetched. (Miles is actually more of a stretch, though if we're sticking with my epilogue-in-advance theory - and I'm not sure that I am, as we'll get to shortly - it works, in that he and Sawyer had plenty of experience maintaining law and order in the Dharma Initiative, and seemed to enjoy doing it.)

Seeing alt-James Ford try to use his powers of charm and persuasion for good instead of evil (and what is an undercover cop, after all, if not a confidence man?) was a nice spin on the character, and worked nicely in parallel to the island story. On the mainland, Sawyer's gone from the dark to the light side. On the island, he's given up trying to figure out which side is which, and is content to simply play the two sides in front of him against each other, while he helps the only side he really cares about (his friends) get off the island with him. We had all assumed (or hoped) that Sawyer was running a con on Smokey when they hooked up in "The Substitute," and it was nice to be proven right. I just hope his powers of persuasion - as Smokey puts it, "You're the best liar I've ever met" - are strong enough to fake out both a vengeful billionaire and an immortal, shape-shifting, telekinetic smoke monster. Because if not... he's gonna have some 'splaining to do.

Now, as to the theorizing: part of the epilogue-in-advance theory came from the notion that characters' fates in the other timeline seem to be more or less happy depending on whether they sided with Jacob (more) or Smokey (less). But Locke's doesn't really fit that, since he never got the chance to decide at all, what with being dead. And while the James Ford we see tonight seems mostly healthier than the one we know (he has an obsession, but he also has a job he likes, a partner who has his back, and it doesn't appear that he killed Frank Duckett in Australia), the Sawyer on the island is still functioning as an independent operator, not interested in any faction of the war that's building. Maybe at a later date he'll throw in with Jacob, but right now he's just a fly in the ointment.

So then I started to think on an e-mail exchange I had last week with Mike Schur, co-creator of NBC's "Parks and Recreation" (currently the best sitcom on TV, and one you better be watching if you aren't already, and not just because of this mustache), and also well known on the interwebs as Ken Tremendous from the seminal sports blog Fire Joe Morgan. Mike found my epilogue theory intriguing, but rather than ask to subscribe to my newsletter, he offered his own alternative. Here, reprinted with his permission, are a couple of excerpts summing up the idea:

I think the alt-present scenes are an attempt to show what each character's true nature is, absent any situation where the island draws them more towards either Smokey or Jacob. This didn't occur to me until last night, but it felt like they were saying: Ben is an intellectual guy, searching for meaning in his life, frustrated by powerlessness, and thus capable of Machiavellian manipulations. But inherently, when push comes to shove, he is decent. Which is why in the island-reality he chose, at that crucial moment, to steer away from Smokey and back to Jacob. Sayid, on the other hand, has something inherently violent and evil in him, which is why in the alt-present he killed those guys, and on the island gave himself over to Smokey. Jack is deeply conflicted about his father and has it in him to be angry and conflicted, but in the alt-present he is inherently interested in being a good father himself and breaking the cycle of emotional abuse, so in the island-reality he's on Team Jacob, and so forth.

[...]

I think they are "influencing" what is happening on the island only inasmuch as they show us what these people truly are, in the truest existential sense -- their actual natures are at play in the alt-futures, and those "teetering-between-good-and-evil" natures, I guess you could say, are what Jacob "saw," somehow, and they are what led him to determine that they are "candidates." That moment where Smokey picked up the white rock off the scale and tossed it out the door is more fuel for this theory -- they pick people who are perfectly balanced between "bad" and "good" and bring them to the island as a sort of laboratory to determine which of those forces wins out in the end. So the events that are occurring in the island-present -- the Lost version of "The Stand," where sides are being drawn -- are the "result" (though not really, obviously, in the causal sense) of the alt-futures, wherein we are seeing that left to their own devices, each of these people tilts slightly to one side of the good/evil equation.

Now, that very much seems to fit with what we've seen in past flash-sideways like Sayid's, and like the one from tonight. If Jacob doesn't come to see young James at the funeral, maybe the kid doesn't teeter over the precipice and become a full-on bad guy, and maybe it turns out that his true nature - as we saw in his LaFleur period, and at other points on and off the island - is as someone who'd like to be a hero in better circumstances.

The big hole in Mike's theory, from where I sit, is that he doesn't provide a reason for why this other reality exists. Lindelof and Cuse have said the flash-sideways aren't just an excuse for a What-If? style of storytelling, nor should they be at this late date. We're in the final season, and if something has no real bearing on the story we've been watching for seasons one through five, then it has no business being on the screen. And I think the producers are smart enough to know that, even as I continue to think they made a mistake in trying to maintain an air of mystery around what these stories mean.

But when the sideways stories are grounded by actors like Michael Emerson last week, or Josh Holloway this week, and told with the kind of pathos and humor and, yes, confidence that "Lost" achieves at its best, then my patience lasts a little longer.

Some other thoughts on "Recon":

• This is now the second flash-sideways to climax with the episode's central character having a surprising run-in with another character who hasn't shown up in this timeline for a few weeks. I don't know if there's going to be enough time to double back to showing how either Jin wound up in Keamy's freezer or what Kate's running from, but her appearance did remind me that in "LA X," Sawyer saw her handcuffs (and, therefore, knew she was a fugitive on the loose) and didn't try to stop her. So maybe this Ford's not quite the good guy I'd like him to be.

• Speaking of Kate, while I complain about Evangeline Lilly a lot, I thought she was very good in her island scenes in this one. Kate only came back to this stupid island for the sake of her son, and the hope of reuniting Aaron with his biological mommy. And since she gave her boy away and got on the Ajira flight, she's had to travel through time, get shot at by the Dharma Initiative, nearly die in whatever happened when Jughead went off, discover that Sawyer has fallen deeply in love with Juliet (and is now too consumed with grief to really be into the whole Freckles phenomenon), been taken captive by The Others again, menaced by the Smoke Monster, fallen into the company of a man she believes to be dead... and for what? To find out that Claire has completely lost her mind, and wants to kill Kate for doing the right thing by Aaron for the past three years? I know that would mess me up, and Lilly very neatly captured Kate's pain and frustration (and maternal guilt) at realizing just how badly she miscalculated the whole trip.

• I In the whole "who's the good guy?" debate, this episode went out of its way to show Smokey telling the truth at every turn. Of course, he doesn't always tell the whole truth - as when he responds to Cindy's question about the other Temple people by saying, "The black smoke killed them" - but if he's omitting things, none of what he actually says contradicts things we know to be true about the island.

• And Smokey's apparent honesty, in turn, makes me wonder about the story he told Kate about his crazy mother. Aside from being pleasantly surprised to meet a "Lost" character with mommy issues rather than daddy issues, I'm wondering exactly who this mother could be. Given all the time travel issues floating around the show, is there a chance his crazy mom might actually be Claire - that the Man in Black is somehow Aaron unstuck in time, immortal, and made of black smoke? I would hope not - after people began wondering if Desmond and Penny's son Charlie might somehow grow up to be Charlie Pace, I began wincing at the amount of liberties that time travel gives to rampant speculation - but I have to admit the thought did cross my mind.

• Speaking of Charlie, his brother Liam turns up at the precinct to try to bail him out after the drug mess in "LA X," and Liam's not the only familiar face from seasons past to cameo in sideways world. Of course Miles would be friends with Charlotte in either reality, particularly since we know from "Dr. Linus" that the island did exist in the '70s, and that therefore Miles' and Charlotte's mothers might know each other in this timeline, too. Charlotte and Sawyer weren't incredibly close in the real timeline, but she was part of his small time-traveling band in the first half of last season, and like many a woman on the show (or in the audience), she couldn't resist the charms of James Ford with his shirt off.

• Couple of familiar faces from TV, but new to the show, in Sheila Kelley (from "LA Law," and also from her marriage to Richard Schiff) as Zoe, and Fred Koehler (from "Kate & Allie" as a kid, and many things as a grown-up) as one of Widmore's soldiers.

• Widmore's dismissive "How little you actually know" comment to Sawyer about the origin of the freighter makes me question a lot of his previous protestations of goodness. We know he sent the damn freighter, so unless Keamy and company were somehow working under some secret higher authority, most of season four's bloodshed is Widmore's fault. And if he's building a barrier to repel Smokey, does that add more fuel to the Smoke-as-good-guy fire?

• Lots of little Sawyer easter eggs in the LA X scenes. Ford's code word is LaFleur, he has a copy of "Watership Down" on his dresser (though the book was originall Boone's in the real timeline, Sawyer stole it) and still watches "Little House on the Prairie." (And the scene they chose, of Charles Ingalls reassuring Laura about death, and saying you hold memories of your lost loved ones until you see them again, has me wondering if it's going to foreshadow some kind of Sawyer sacrifice so he can get back with Juliet.)

• Alt-James has a list, just like Jacob.

• At this point, they're just taunting me with outrigger scenes, aren't they? Though at the rate characters will have to go back and forth to Alcatraz to keep the Widmore story going, maybe we will get closure on the shootout, after all.

• Other than the need for padlocks (to keep people out? or to keep the contents in?), do we really have any clues as to who or what is behind the special door on the sub?

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Dr. Linus": Follow another leader

A review of tonight's terrific "Lost" coming up just as soon as I make another trip to Marshall's...

"Maybe you should be the principal." -Locke

Whatever issues I've had with this season of "Lost," there is no problem with the series so great that a little Michael Emerson can't fix it.

Here, Emerson (and a huge group of other creative types, including writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and special guest director Mario Van Peebles) helped give us easily the most compelling episode of this final season so far, one where all the tumblers clicked into place and I was reminded in so many different ways of why I love "Lost," past, present, future and alternate timeline.

Hell, it was even an episode where I enjoyed all the Jack scenes, and given that I'm told I have a pathological hatred of the character, that's saying something.

For now, I'm sticking with my theory that the flash-sideways are an epilogue in advance - that this is where and when the characters all wound up in the aftermath of the war between Smokey and Jacob's forces. (I have no idea if I'm right, nor will I be upset either way when the reveal comes, but right now it's important for me to have some idea of what the alt-timeline scenes mean, even if it turns out I'm completely wrong. Otherwise, there's no weight to them this late in the "real world" timeline.)

During last week's discussion of "Sundown," some of you speculated that if I'm right, we're seeing key differences in the endings of the characters who sided with Jacob and those who went with Smokey. Sayid goes with Smokey, and in the alt-timeline has a kind of monkey's paw fantasy where he's near Nadia but not with her, and still placed in situations where he has to be the killer he doesn't want to be. Hurley, meanwhile, goes with Jacob and ends up far happier and luckier than he was in the original timeline.

And Ben, who ultimately and movingly turns his back on Smokey at the end of this one, winds up in an alternate life that turns out to be more good than bad. Yes, he's only a European History teacher to a mostly-disinterested group of students, but he has a much healthier relationship with his dad than he did in the timeline we know, has the respect and admiration of Alex (even if Alt-Alex was never stolen from her mom), and turns out to be more capable of choosing love over power than the Ben we know ever could...

...until, that is, we see that our Ben deeply regrets the decision he made with Alex. And faced with the choice of regaining his crown under Smokey or being just another soldier in the army being formed by Jacob's chosen, Ben rejects power in favor of penance, of doing the right thing as a pawn rather than the wrong as a king.

Ben Linus, really, is a character who shouldn't work at all. Because he lies and manipulates at every turn, he could so easily exist solely as crutch of the writers, there to nudge the plot in whatever direction they deem necessary, and to mix lies and truths so deftly that the viewers can never be sure what to believe. But the genius of Michael Emerson's performance is the conviction with which he delivers every one of Ben's lies and shifts in allegiance. I know I should never believe any words that come out of Ben's mouth (at least, not in this timeline), but time and again, I fall for it.

And I sure fell hard for that climactic scene with Ilana, as did Ilana herself. I have every reason to distrust Ben, and she has every reason to put a bullet in him, and by the end of his monologue about the reason he killed Jacob(*), I felt for the little weasel, and I believed that he's finally abandoned his quest for power and is maybe capable of doing the right thing for its own sake, and not because he might benefit from it. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out Ben played me (and Ilana) once again, but Emerson sold me, just like he always does.

(*) One of the unavoidable design flaws of "Lost" is that characters drift in and out of the narrative so often that it becomes hard sometimes to keep all the relevant details in mind. By the time Ben got all stabby with Jacob, it had been so long in real time since Alex was killed - and even a month since Smokey-as-Alex laid a guilt trip on Ben in "Dead is Dead" - that I left her death out of the equation of vengeance Ben calculated before he put the knife in. At the time, I was just thinking of how frustrated Ben was to have spent all those years as the island's leader without ever actually hearing from Jacob, but of course he'd be consumed with rage that he let his "daughter" be killed in service to this man who had so systematically ignored him. So when Ben said it to Ilana, it gave that climactic moment from "The Incident" even more resonance.

My fear about this final season was that it would devolve into a contest between two supernatural arch-rivals I don't care a whit about, but an episode like this one nicely reframed the story as being about the human cost of Jacob and Smokey's war. Richard has spent centuries blindly following Jacob's orders, and the knowledge that Jacob apparently died with his plan unfinished has made the immortal man a suicidal one. Ben is similarly crushed by sins he committed (or allowed to happen) in Jacob's name. And Jack, our man of science, who wants a rational explanation for everything (even though he's singularly incapable of asking the sorts of questions that might elicit them), was so transformed by his visit to Jacob's lighthouse - finally unable to deny the grand plans of the island any longer - that he was willing to risk his own death because he had faith, deep down, that the dynamite wouldn't go off.

The scene in the belly of the Black Rock was a great one for Matthew Fox, so well-played that I was mostly able to set aside my usual frustration at how none of the Lostaways are ever able to get a straight answer out of one of The Others. Richard shows up and says "you wouldn't believe me if I told you" where he was, and when Jack offers to try, Richard says, "Not yet."(**) And when I thought for sure Jack was going to use Richard's desperate need for Jack to play Dynamite Dr. Kevorkian to force some answers out of him, he instead lit the fuse, and left their relationship in a place where Richard now considers Jack to be the one with the answers. But because Fox and Nestor Carbonell were so good, I was able to suppress most of my eye-roll reflexes and just go with a very cool moment.

(**) Immediately after Richard says his maddening "Not yet," Kitsis and Horowitz provide a very meta exchange between Jack and Hurley, where Hurley asks why Jack would trust Richard, and Jack replies, "At least he's not stalling." For that matter, I wonder if Alt-Arzt's ability to get Alt-Ben to so quickly explain his plan was also a kind of meta-commentary - that of course Arzt, who in his brief tenure on the show served as a guy who voiced many of the complaints and questions the audience had in season one, would be much better at getting people like Ben to talk than Jack ever was. Suddenly, the idea of an alternate version of the show built around what Arzt, Nikki and Paolo were up to - "Expose" as a series - sounds almost intriguing, and not just because Miles finally dug up the diamonds that got buried with those twits.

Smokey only has a brief cameo, and we don't see any of the people who willingly or reluctantly joined his army, but at least the two sides of the conflict are starting to take shape. Ben has cast his lot with Ilana, and Jack, Hurley and Richard have now joined them (in the kind of dialogue-free, Giacchino-heavy sequence the show so effectively ended many episodes on in seasons past). And in the episode's final, mostly chilling(***) moments, we see a wild-card enter the mix, as Charles Widmore arrives in a submarine, intentions unknown.

(***) Would have been more chilling, of course, if I hadn't spotted Alan Dale's name in the guest credits. Lindelof and Cuse have said there's no way around that, because of SAG rules - even though "Battlestar Galactica" famously managed to circumvent those rules once in an episode where listing the actor in question's name would have ruined everything - and it's a shame. I'm sure the Guild has much larger problems to worry about than credit placement, but it would be nice if they could be more flexible on waivers for shows like this that often depend so heavily on surprising you with the return of a familiar face.

Clearly, this is the "someone" Jacob said was coming to the island, and he has the resources to tip the balance of power one way or the other, or to make things even worse if his agenda runs counter to both parties.

Hell of an episode. Can't wait for the next one.

Some other thoughts on "Dr. Linus":

• One name I was very happy to see in the guest credits: William Atherton, who hit the D-bag trifecta with roles in three of my favorite '80s movies ("Ghostbusters," "Die Hard" and "Real Genius"), and who was perfectly cast as Principal Reynolds, a man sleazy enough to deserve Alt-Ben's hate, but also slick enough to out-maneuver Ben. When Atherton had a recurring role on the second and final season of "Life," I made it my mission to feature an Atherton '80s movie quote in each post about an episode he appeared in. I exhausted most of the good ones then, so instead, go watch this scene from "Real Genius."

• Okay, I recognized Chaim Potok's "The Chosen" (a nice riff on the idea of "candidates") among the books Miles found in Sawyer's tent, but could someone tell what the Benjamin Disraeli book was?

• And speaking of candidates, Ilana confirms that they're candidates to replace Jacob, not Smokey.

• With a bunch of characters now hanging at the beach, armed with rifles, should I get my hopes up about completing the circuit of the outrigger shoot-out? Or am I better off, again, assuming that's one of those things Team Darlton decided to drop for season six?

• A nice touch in the scene with Alt-Ben and Alt-Roger: Ben gives his father gas, only here it's something to keep him alive (oxygen), rather than to kill him (the nerve gas from the purge).

• I also liked that, in the final scene between Alt-Ben and Principal Reynolds, it's implied that even though Ben dropped his demand to take Reynolds' job, he's still finding ways to exploit the power of those e-mails, here getting him to re-open the History Club. (And five'll get ya ten that Arzt winds up having to supervise detention, albeit with a better parking space.)

• Hurley drops his usual "Star Wars" references to ask if Richard is a cyborg like from "Terminator."

• The scene on the beach at the end is the first time Sun has seen Hurley or Jack since the Ajira crash, right? Again, characters flit in and out that I'm worried I might have forgotten something. In character time, it's only been a few days (or weeks at most) since she's seen them, but it's been a while for us.

After reminding you about the No Spoilers rule - which extends to discussing the content of the previews for next week's episode - let me ask... what did everybody else think?

Lost, "Sundown": A history of violence

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I have an unfortunate incident involving a boomerang...

"You think you know me, but you don't. I am a good man." -Sayid

Dude, you tried to kill Baby Hitler. You might want to reconsider that statement.

"Lost" is all about eternal struggles - good vs. evil, science vs. faith, free will vs. destiny - and fundamentally about man vs. his own nature. John Locke wants to be a big man but can't overcome his own smallness. Jack Shephard tries to fix everything and usually winds up destroying it.

And Sayid Jarrah wants to be a good man free to enjoy the love of his good woman, but instead he's always the man brought in when people need killing.

Where the last two weeks brought us alternate versions of Locke and Jack who managed to break their emotional cycles - a Locke at peace with his disability and unremarkable life, a Jack reaching out to his son in a way Christian never reached out to him - we discover that Sayid in any timeline, in any locale, at any age, is always going to be the one called upon for a bit of the ol' ultra-violence. He doesn't want it, but he can't escape it. Alt-Locke gets a wife, Alt-Jack gets a son, and Alt-Sayid gets... a chance to put a couple of bullets into Keamy? And to watch his beloved Nadia raise a family with Sayid's brother Omar - the same Omar who needed Sayid as a child to kill the chicken for him, and who needs him as an adult to take care of his Keamy problem? Oh, and he gets a bloody, non-English-speaking Jin in a freezer? Where's the fair in that?

I still feel Cuse and Lindelof made a tactical error in giving us the sliding doors timeline without telling us in advance what it is, because until we do, they have all the weight and meaning of a dream sequence. But the more we see of them, the stronger my feeling grows that we're seeing the series' epilogue in advance. It may not turn out this way, but at the moment it seems the flash-sideways are where the castaways wind up after the war with Smokey ends, as some kind of reward from one of the celestial powers going to war over the island, be it Jacob or Smokey. Smokey does seem awfully confident in the prospect of letting Sayid see Nadia again, after all.

And if that's the case, the rewards seem mixed at best. Locke gets Helen back (and gets to live, for that matter), but is back in the damn chair. Jack gets a son, but also a life that's otherwise as broken as the one he had the first go-round. Kate is free of Marshal Mars, but still a fugitive. And Sayid has Nadia in his life, but not really.

But from what we know of these characters, and of their tortured histories, maybe this is exactly what they asked Smokey and/or Jacob for. Sayid knows in either timeline that he's too much the killer to deserve Nadia, but at least this way he gets to know her, and to have a pretext to see her whenever he can stand it. Kate isn't rewarded for her return to LA like she was as one of the Oceanic Six, but she's also not in a cell and for now gets to be around Aaron's mother. Jack has a means to address his daddy issues that don't involve his actual daddy. Dogen gets his son (and his life) back. Etc., etc. Not wholly happy endings, but the best anyone may feel they deserve.

Whatever the flash-sideways mean, they definitely work better when built around the show's stronger characters/actors - Locke two weeks ago, or Sayid tonight. Again, I'm not demanding answers so much as I am entertainment, and watching Sayid kick ass in two timelines, even as both versions recognized that they're doomed to be killers, was damned entertaining. Naveen Andrews is often at his best when Sayid is at his most despairingly self-reflective, and that moment when he fixed Ben with a grin and said there wasn't time for him anymore was one of Andrews' strongest (and certainly scariest) of the series. When all you're good for is killing, and yet the monster wearing your dead friend's face says that killing is the only way to get back the woman you love, how do you deal with that? On the list of things the "Lost" characters have had to swallow, that epiphany feels particularly brutal.

It had been a while since we got to see a good Sayid fight - the last one that strongly registers for me is the one he had with original recipe Keamy in the season four finale - and we got a real corker in his broom-handled throwdown with Dogen. And in 2004, we saw him cut through Keamy's goons(*) and then Keamy himself(**), not letting himself be fooled by the man's promises to clear Sayid's brother's debt.

(*) Were they all members of his mercenary team from season four? I recognized the bald guy, but wasn't sure on the others.

(**) He was only on the show for a season, and not featured all that much in that season, but Kevin Durand always made an impression as Keamy. Lots of actors might have his sheer physical size, but there's a sense of danger (insanity?) that you can't build at the gym, you know?

And while Sayid was showing off his hand-to-hand and small arms skills, Smokey was putting on a much grander show of force, and preceding it with a good old-fashioned campaign of terror, using Sayid to whip the Temple crew into a frenzy (and then to take out Dogen and Lennon) before doing his smoke monster thing that he does so well. Sometimes, all I need from "Lost" are the simple pleasures, and a good Smokey rampage is high on that list.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the Temple characters were, other than to stand around and be cryptic for a handful of episodes before Sayid and Smokey wiped them out, but we end the episode in a much more interesting place than we began it. Smokey is building himself an army, and one that includes the crazy (Claire), the converted (Sayid), the suspicious (Kate and Jin), the fearful (Cindy and the kids) and the don't-give-a-damn (Saywer), and he's currently carrying himself like a man certain of victory. Ilana and the rest of the gang from the beach finally linked up with some other character (even if Miles is the only one to actually stick with them). If Dogen never entirely had a point, at least we're done with him and the Temple.

And since the show skipped over the Sun-centric episode we might have expected given how all the previous episodes followed the air pattern of season one, we know that Lindelof and Cuse aren't going to just give us parallel drawings of early episodes.

A much, much stronger outing than last week.

Some other thoughts:

• So how does Alt-Jin go from being detained by TSA agents at the airport to being taped up in Keamy's freezer? I'm guessing the money the TSA was so interested in was a payoff that got confiscated, and Keamy wasn't interested in any excuses.

• I'm really hoping Andrews' more pronounced British accent - both in the Temple and as Alt-Sayid - is a deliberate choice with a meaning, and not Andrews just getting his signals crossed in the final season.

• Anyone want to set the over-under on how long before Crazy Claire gets Kate alone and tries to cut Aaron's location out of her?

• I'm not exactly where Dogen ranked on the Others' corporate hierarchy relative to Ben, but the two guys clearly attended the same leadership seminar, one that involves lying and torturing when the truth upfront would be much more useful - and that then puts you in a very bad spot when you suddenly need your torture victim to trust you. The Others need a better HR rep next time out, I think.

• Jack makes a brief cameo when Sayid goes to see Nadia and his brother at the hospital, and it doesn't appear that either he or Sayid recognized each other in the way that Kate seemed to know Jack, or Jack seemed to know Desmond, in previous scenes/episodes set in the LA X timeline.

• Did I mention that I loved the Sayid/Dogen fight?

What did everybody else think?

Firewall & Iceberg podcast, episode 5: Parenthood, American Idol, Lost and more

It's Wednesday, so time for another episode of the Firewall & Iceberg podcast. The post at NJ.com has the full rundown of topics by time so you can avoid spoilers and/or shows you don't care about.

More technical issues this week than last, I'm afraid (karma for us getting cocky, I think), and there's still a specific roadblock to getting on the iTunes store that we have to work on. But stream/download away.

Lost, "Lighthouse": Classical composition

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I lie to a samurai...

"Jack is here because he has to do something. He can't be told what that is. He's got to find it himself. Sometimes, you can just hop in the back of someone's cab and tell them what they're supposed to do. Other times, you have to let him look out at the ocean for a while." -Jacob
"Well, next time, how about you tell me everything upfront? I'm not big on secret plans." -Hurley

Midway through "Lighthouse," Hurley tells Jack, "This is cool, dude. Very old school." And I agree with him - just not in a good way. If last week's "The Substitute" evoked great past episodes like "Walkabout," "Orientation" and "The Brig," "Lighthouse" mainly reminded me of those pre-"Through the Looking Glass" episodes of the show where characters would wander around aimlessly for most of the running time and fail to ask any good questions when given the opportunity, only for things to be saved by a really good cliffhanger.

Here's the thing: I'm on record as saying I don't require answers to everything in this final season, so long as good stories are told. But in two out of these first four episodes, we've gotten no answers and flat stories.

I know there are certain storytelling devices you just have to accept when you watch "Lost," like the way characters rarely seem to share information or don't ask good questions, but it was easier to accept that in the show's earlier days, when we knew Lindelof and Cuse (who got script credit for this episode, the show's Number-iffic 108th) had to stall because they didn't know how long they'd have to stretch things out for. But the finish line isn't just set; it's in sight, and now it feels particularly stupid that Jack apparently doesn't know any more about what happened to Claire than what Dogen told him at the end of "What Kate Does," and maddening that the island's movers and shakers still feel the need to manipulate our heroes through misleading or purposely vague instructions.

Watching Jack smash the lighthouse's mirrors, and recognizing that this is exactly what Jacob must have intended when he told Hurley to bring Jack along, reminded me once again of Ben's overly-convoluted plan to get Jack into performing spinal surgery on him. Back in the middle of season 3, I asked Lindelof why Ben required such a ridiculous scheme when he could have walked up to the castaways' beach on, like, day 5 and offered them shelter and food (let alone a trip home on the Dharma sub) in exchange for some tumor removal. Lindelof countered that "that version is considerably less intriguing for a mystery show." The problem is that if that's the only reason things are vague and overly-complicated - if it doesn't come from the characters, or the needs of the story, but from an external need to maintain an air of mystery - then it doesn't work. It's obvious and distracting and irritating, especially this late in the game, when there's no damn excuse for it.

Yes, Jack Shephard can be a stubborn ass who doesn't always do or believe what he's told, but he's that way in part because of what's happened to him on Craphole Island. He came back to the island in a much calmer, accepting state of mind, and while that state of mind got all blown to hell when Faraday's plan failed to work (and killed Juliet), I have to believe that if Jacob's ghost stood next to Hurley and through him told Jack exactly what was going to happen and what he needed him to do to make things better, Jack might've listened. Would that have made for compelling drama? No, but if that's the case, tell a different story! Don't build an entire hour around our characters once again being led around by the nose, following some plan they don't much understand, getting vague promises of more information down the road. Because that damn sure isn't compelling drama.

Nor, for the most part, was the flash-sideways to Jack's life as every-fourth-weekend dad. As I've been saying for a couple of weeks, I think all the 2004 scenes may eventually play better on second viewing, after we find out what they really mean, but until that happens, they might as well be extended dream sequences - yet another thing we don't particularly need to be messing about with here in the final season.

Last week's Locke story at least worked as a kind of coda to the life of a character who's dead in the main timeline, and brought us back to a relationship we knew well from several previous episodes. Jack's relationship with son David, on the other hand, was brand-new, created from some previous marriage Jack had due to whatever circumstances are different in this timeline versus the one we know(*). So we were starting from scratch, and while Matthew Fox and Dylan Minnette were both quite good at portraying the unsteady father-son dynamic, it was a lot harder to invest in than seeing Locke reunited with Helen. I suppose you could look on it as something of a happy ending for alt-Jack (he finally bonds with his kid) just like Locke got last week, but if so, the payoff didn't feel as strong because it mostly came from new material (though Jack's daddy issues date back to the comparable episode from the first season), and because the character is still with us on the island in 2007, and it therefore felt less necessary.

(*) And between Jack having a kid and a different ex-wife (or, at least, having married Sarah at a much younger age) and Locke being on great terms with Anthony Cooper, it's clear that this timeline's changes go much deeper than the island being sunk and Others like Ben and Dogen being on the mainland. I also have to wonder if Jack ever had his appendix out in either timeline, or if the scar he was so puzzled by came from something on the island, and is being explained away by whatever force created this other timeline.

So of the three stories in the "Lighthouse," the only one that kept me engaged throughout was Jin's nightmarish stint at Claire's tent, with its creepy homemade baby doll in the cradle Locke built and the variety of deadly tools and surgical instruments. Turning Claire into a second-generation version of Rousseau is an intriguing direction(**) and a nice turn of events for Emilie de Ravin, who didn't exactly have the most dynamic character to play for the first four seasons. The sense of dread and insanity in that tent was palpable, and I enjoyed watching Daniel Dae Kim portray Jin's dawning acceptance of who and what his friend had become, and how desperately he needs to get away from her.

(**)Though it does leave me wondering if, like the post-"Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham" Locke for most of season 5, we saw a character we knew die, for all intents and purposes, a while back without realizing it. Did Claire (at least as we knew her) really die when the mercenaries attacked New Otherton? After Christian's ghost came for her? Or is this more Claire than Smokey is Locke?

The return of Smokey (or insert your own fake nickname here)means things can only get better next week. And they'd better. I didn't want to believe the complaints of the last two weeks that Team Darlton was under some sort of obligation to write the series differently because we're in the final season. But I see it now, and I'm starting to get impatient waiting for things to either get in gear, or just get more entertaining. 'Cause when Terry O'Quinn and/or Josh Hollway aren't around, things are dragging - far more than they should at this stage in the series' lifespan.

Some other thoughts:

• Sayid's accent remains decidedly more British post-resurrection. I have to assume this is deliberate, and not just Naveen Andrews getting a little sloppy, because sooner or later someone would correct him.

• One of my Twitter followers compared Jack's pep talk to David to the scene where Casey tells his son he'll always be proud of him, from the "Sports Night" season 1 finale. If you've seen said episode, you'll likely agree.

• With this season's episodes deliberately following the structure of season one's (a group premiere, then a Kate episode, then Locke, then Jack, etc.), it made sense of Jack to return to the caves he first discovered in that season's comparable "White Rabbit." The cave is also where Jack and Kate (in the next episode, "House of the Rising Sun") found the Adam and Eve skeletons, and here Hurley again gets to play the voice of the fans in suggesting the corpses might be two Oceanic 815 passengers sent far back in time.

• Hurley's time travel comments, by the way, for some reason made me think of the kayak shootout from last season when Sawyer and company kept skipping through eras. Is that the only bit of time travel from that season that never got entirely explained (i.e., we never found out who was in the other boat)? And, if so, do you think we'll ever find out the answer, or is that one of those minor loose threads we just have to accept won't get tied up?

What did everybody else think?

Lost: I'm a substitute for no other guy

If you didn't get enough podcast flavor from me in this week's edition of Firewall & Iceberg, I also popped in on this week's episode of Ryan McGee and Mo Ryan's DVD commentary-style "Lost"-themed podcast "Orientation: Ryan Station," where we kibbitz while watching "The Substitute." (And if you missed my review of that one, here it is.) We talk about Sawyer's love of vintage punk, Hurley's business-casual look, that photo (pictured above) in Locke's cubicle, and a whole bunch more.

Lost, "The Substitute": Happy John

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I describe myself as a people person...

"John Locke was a... believer. He was a man of faith. He was a much better man than I will ever be, and I'm very sorry I murdered him." -Ben

I saw a lot of fan anger after "What Kate Does" aired last week, in part because it was a Kate episode, but mainly because many people felt like it was "filler" at a point when people feel the show should be going pedal-to-the-metal towards a conclusion while providing as many answers as possible along the way. Some even went so far as to call it the worst episode since the one about Jack's tattoos.

Now, I didn't love "What Kate Does," but my issues had to do more with the Kate end of the equation than any notion of filler. I'm still not sure what the purpose of the flash-diagonals is - and still suspect those scenes will all play much better on a second viewing after they're explained to us - but I know I cared about what was happening in those scenes a hell of a lot more when it was John Locke at the center of things.

And if the alternate timeline (or whatever it is) accomplishes nothing else, it at least gave John Locke - or a John Locke - the relatively happy ending (for now) that he was so cruelly denied by Ben and the hand of fate in the version of reality we know. On the island, Locke is eulogized as both a good man (by Ben) and a scary scared one (by Sawyer); on the mainland, he's a guy who's had some tough breaks but is doing alright with the love of a good woman.

I know many of you want - and deserve - answers to many of the questions the writers have raised over the previous five seasons, but to me this final season of "Lost" needs to be at least as much about doing right by the surviving characters as it is about explaining what the Numbers are(*).

(*) And the cave ceiling at least tells us the Numbers came from (or were used by) Jacob, but still not what they mean.

Smokey has Locke's memories and some of his personality - witness the priceless moment where Smokey screams out Locke's "Don't tell me what I can't do!" catchphrase - and Terry O'Quinn is still gainfully employed, but the man we know and care about died (in at least one timeline) in a grubby motel room. And for one week, we got to see a version of Locke who was still alive, and happier than we'd seen at any point in the run of the series. This was a Locke who was occasionally frustrated by circumstances, but capable of maintaining a healthy relationship with Helen, of laughing off an indignity like the sprinklers going off in his face, of enjoying the small pleasures of being a substitute teacher. And Terry O'Quinn's typically wonderful performance captured every bit of pride and joy and frustration of this alternate version of the character we know and mourn, and to provide some closure for that version of him no matter what happens to the monster wearing his face on the island.

And speaking of Smokey-as-Locke, I guess I'm in a particularly Zen mood about the answers (or lack thereof) so far this season, because I was mostly amused by the idea that Smokey - who claims to want to explain the plot of the series to anyone willing to listen - spends most of the episode paired with Sawyer, the regular character who cares the absolute least about the mythology of the island. In fact, I found myself caring more about watching Josh Holloway blend the grief-stricken Sawyer of the season's first two episodes with the sarcastic, self-destructive guy he was for most of the previous seasons more than about whatever it was Smokey was going to tell Sawyer, or Richard, or whomever.

It can be fun to speculate about whether Jacob was the good guy or the bad guy (and it's not hard to envision a scenario where he's bad, based on what he put all our heroes through), to wonder if the blond boy who reminds Smokey of "the rules" is some kind of higher island power who kept Jacob and Esau trapped on the island over the centuries, about whether Jin or Sun is the "candidate" Jacob had in mind when he scratched "Kwon" into the cave ceiling (and what it means for characters like Kate who don't seem to be on the ceiling at all).

But the thing about the Jacob/Esau/Smokey/backgammon stuff is that it's made me oddly less interested in the mythology, not more. We know now (or seem to know) that the characters on the show are only game pieces to these two abstract, supernatural figures - that most of the key decisions made on and off the island by Jack, Sayid and the rest have been in service to Jacob's plan - and the controlled, predestined quality to it all leaves me a little cold. Like, the characters' actions are already dictated by a pair of omniscient beings in Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse - albeit omniscient beings who prefer to perform light comedy together rather than try to kill each other - without layering another pair in between.

In the early days of the show, Lindelof liked to say that when the time came for he and Cuse to start revealing the big answers, viewers would be invariably disappointed, either because the reality wasn't the same as what they'd imagined, or because it was too much like what they'd imagined (and therefore wasn't surprising). None of the Jacob material feels like Cuselof have played unfairly with their audience, but thus far, the more I learn about the mythology, the more I want to focus on the people, on the comedy, the action and the many other parts of "Lost" that don't have to do with answering questions and cosmic games of dice.

And so an episode like "The Substitute," which offered more mythology hints but also had two great beating hearts in Locke in the real world and Sawyer on the island, was damned satisfying, even if I still don't know why The Others couldn't have children or who The Economist is.

Some other thoughts:

• Loved the Smokey-eye-view tour of various island landmarks. Were we supposed to take that as Smokey taking a quick lap before untying Richard, or a bit of out-of-sequence storytelling (i.e., the New Otherton stuff was from later in the episode when Smokey goes to fetch Sawyer)? And is this how Smokey sees things even while in the form of Locke?

• Hands up, anybody who wouldn't watch a spin-off about Benjamin Linus, snotty European History teacher? Certainly, Michael Emerson's gift for making incredibly mundane things sound funny has rarely been used better than in the scene with alt-Ben bitching about the coffee pot.

• So far, Jeff Fahey hasn't gotten much more to do as a cast regular than when he was a recurring guest star in seasons 4 & 5, but he makes the most out of his small moments, like Lapidus' eye roll and exasperated "This is the weirdest damn funeral I've ever been to" after Ben's eulogy for Locke.

• I will never, never, ever object to some time spent with L. Scott Caldwell as Rose, who definitely gets a shorter end of the stick in the LA X timeline.

• We learned years ago that Hurley owns the box company where Locke worked, and now we finally get the sense that it's not a coincidence that both Hurley (at Mr. Cluck's) and Locke (at the box company) worked for Randy Nations, but rather that Hurley hired the guy (for whatever reason) to work at the box company after the meteorite destroyed Mr. Cluck's.

• Even more startling than the idea of Locke still being in a relationship with Helen was Helen's casual suggestion that they elope to Vegas with "my parents and your dad." Is Anthony Cooper a much less evil man in this timeline, or does alt-Locke somehow have a different daddy? And how did alt-Locke wind up in a wheelchair?

• The island activity in this episode takes place the day after the events of "What Kate Does," right? Now, it's been a while since I've really got my bender on, but Sawyer's undershirt and boxers managed to get awfully filthy in the space of a night, didn't they?

• The song playing on a loop at Sawyer's New Otherton bungalow was "Search and Destroy" by Iggy and the Stooges.

• I did a major forehead slap when Ilana told Sun that Jin must be at the temple. If these two keep crossing paths without finding each other for the bulk of the season, I'm going to be annoyed.

• "Of Mice and Men" was a big source of Sawyer/Ben discussion in season three's "Every Man for Himself," and comes up again here as Sawyer briefly threatens to shoot Smokey/Locke.

• We know from the season 2 finale that the four-toed foot is pretty far from the original Lostaways beach (Sayid and company had to sail to find it), yet Ilana and Ben carried Locke's corpse all the way from the foot to the Oceanic 815 graveyard where Libby, Nikki, Paolo and company are buried? That seems quite a haul.

• Because "Lost" so often paints in bright, archetypal colors, the dialogue can veer into corniness, but really good actors manage to sell it, anyway. Case in point: Katey Sagal (on a breather from her award-worthy work on FX's tremendous "Sons of Anarchy") making me not only not wince at Helen's "the only thing I was ever waiting for was you" line, but rather feel moved by it.

After reminding you once again about the commenting rules - specifically the No Spoilers portion (and the "no talking about the previews" sub-section) - let me ask, what did everybody else think?