The last Lost spoilers you'll ever read (or not, if you want to stay pure)

How stupid do they think we are? I'll give it a miss.

Lost Season 6

[via AV Club]

Lost Finale Tonight

Tonight is the season finale for Lost, and I expect that at the very least we will be seeing the last of the time travel scenarios. Beyond that I have no idea what's going to happen. But here's a few things I'll be looking for:

• Jacob: either his identity, or the nature of whatever he or it actually is.
• The hydrogen bomb: it will explode. Whether or not that's a good thing remains to be seen.
• The statue: tall in the past, fragmentary in the future. The result of the bomb, or something else?
• Rose and Bernhard: I'm not convinced they're important to the mythology of the show, but how can you not like them?
• Everyone will die, or at least appear to die (per Richard's comment from last week).
  

Things I'm hoping for:

• Some hint about Claire and Christian, but that feels like wishful thinking.
  
• The origin of the Others and how it relates to the Black Rock.

But overall I'll take what I can get. This season has been nearly perfect, and I'm not gonna complain -- except to note that season 6 is six months away.

Lost - "The Variable"

Poor Daniel. He deserved so much better.

Here was the one guy that we thought had the smarts and the awareness to unravel the island's mysteries and solve all of our heroes' problems, and he falls victim to a bad case of time traveler's irony. The time loop certainly helps to explain the cold, cryptic spookiness of Mrs. Hawking but doesn't do much to help us understand the larger purpose of Daniel's "experiments," or how he thought a hydrogen bomb would help -- on the other hand, as Chekov said, if you introduce a hydrogen bomb in act one, there better be a mushroom cloud by the end of act three (or something).

Meanwhile, I thought the writers did Daniel and the audience a disservice by having everyone (but Jack) respond to him as though he were a blithering idiot. The sweating, the crying, the memory losses, the greasy hair, the manic behavior, all added up to, as Sawyer described, a very "Twitchy" and unreliable Daniel. And he's the guy we're rooting for. Suddenly the season that felt like it was moving forward so well feels a little futile and pointless. And with just three hours left in the season, I suddenly don't feel like we're in very good hands.

• We still don't know all that much about the Dharma Initiative, or this mysterious electro-magnetic power source, or why they were building the Orchid or the Swan.
• We still don't know much about the Hostiles, where they came from, what they're up to, or why their camp is so easy to find.
• We still don't know how any of these events relate to the purge and how the Hostiles came to take over the DI facilities as the Others.
• We still don't know about the third faction of good/bad guys who are looking for whatever lies in the shadow of the statue.
• And finally, we still don't know who Jacob is, what the smoke monster is, or why Richard Alpert never seems to age.

That's a lot of questions, and with our heroes still stuck in the 70s without their resident genius, its hard to have a sense of how things will unfold from here. Everything suddenly seems to have devolved to in-group bickering and the inevitable splitting into Sawyer, Jack, and Locke led factions, as well as "hey, why'd you shoot that guy who had important information to share"-style conflicts.

"La Fleur" -- Lost

Quite possibly the single greatest episode of all time. A Sawter-centric episode means all action all the time:

1. Sawyer, Juliet, Jin, and Miles are momentarily zapped way back in time.
2. We briefly see the four-toed statue in its full glory.
3. Locke fixed the skipping.
4. How long should we wait for him to return?
   
5. "As long as it takes"
6. 3 Years Later
   
7. Stupid Dharma hijinks. Bunkers and brownies.
   
8. Horace + Dynamite + Trees = Splodey fun.
   
9. Jim La Fleur the Dharma security guy!
10. Mrs. Horace is having a baby
11. 3 years Earlier
12. Sad Daniel
13. Any plan is better than no plan.
14. It doesn't matter what we do. Whatever happened, happened.
15. Who are you?
16. We have to bury them; We have to bring it/him with us. [Did I hear that right?]
17. I'm a professional. I used to lie for a living.
18. Daniel stop!
19. Sonic fence: Turn that thing off.
20. Sneaky. Earplugs.
    
21. Three Years Later
22. Amy needs a Caesarean -she was supposed to get on the sub on Tuesday.
23. Juliet's the only one who can help her. Better than being a Dharma van mechanic.
    
24. Jin's English is really good.
25. Grid 1-3-4 then. How long do we keep looking for our people, James?
    
26. Everyone's OK. Itsa boy. Juliet is tearful.
27. 3 Years Earlier
28. You all have a funny way of showing your appreciation.
29. The Black Rock. Ever heard of her?
30. You are NOT Dharma material. [Heh.]
31. Well... welcome home.
32. The record is spinning again. We're just not on the song we want to hear.
33. Baby Charlotte!
34. Klaxons! Did our heroes accidentally break the truce with the hostiles?
35. It's an angry Richard Alpert who plants a torch in the yard: "Uh-oh" is right.
36. Alpert and Goodspeed.
37. Where are my two men?
38. Hold your horses, Banzai. No one's getting on the sub.
39. Did you bury the bomb?
    
40. Bald guy.
41. Justice.
42. Two weeks till the sub returns. And then what?
43. You do realize, it's 1974. It's not a reason not to go.
44. Three years later.
45. James and Juliet play house.
    
46. Wake up boss.
47. Is that really long enough to get over someone?
48. Absolutely.
49. Ring! Ring! It's Jin
    
50. And yep, you guessed it. They're baaaaaaaack.
    

Dare I ask: who's Paul?

"The Life And Death of Jeremy Bentham" -- Lost

John Locke stories are the heart and soul of this show and last night's episode was a good example of this. Locke returns to the world outside of the island thinking of himself as special and on a mission to save his friends, only to be abused, ignored, ridiculed, injured, and finally murdered. Good times as always. Locke is the ultimate anti-hero for this show because, like most, of us he is frustrated, passionate, full of big ideas and dreams, and completely powerless to master his ambitions. Internally he knows he is capable of great things, but the reality is that his self-image is way out of whack with how the world really sees him.

There was also some great writing in this episode. When Locke goes to see Kate, she reveals to him how he's slipping back into his old crackpot self. It's easy for him to want to go back, she says, because he has never loved anyone and there's nothing to keep him in the world. And you see that Locke is listening to this and reevaluating his mission. He weakens a little, and in a moment of self-revelation, Locke recalls how this exact behavior had destroyed his relationship with Helen and cost him the woman he loved. It's a great character turn. And when Locke searches for a word, the writers have already telegraphed the word he's looking for, and I thought it just before he said it: obsessed.

That's the question that was at the heart of this particular episode. Are the characters heroic, or are they just obsessed? Is the island meaningful, or is it just an end in itself? Can you pursue something and succeed if you don't do it with love and compassion for others?

What was good:

• Locke and Walt, a reminder of how everything was set up in Season 1. Also a passing of the torch now that Locke has taken Walt's place in the overall narrative.
  
• Abbadon, the greatest mystery man of them all. Too bad he got shot.
• The back and forth of who is more evil? Widmore or Ben?
• Widmore describing how he remembered meeting Locke on the island in the 50s.
  
• Ben not being satisfied in letting John kill himself; manipulates John to find out what he knows, then kills him, and stages it to look like a suicide. Evil.
• Helen - the mere mention of her name and the unconvincing story of her death gave me hope that we will see her return.
• Locke telling Jack about Christian.
  

What was confusing:

• Still don't get how John can magically spring back to life on the island after the "crash" of Ajira 316.
• Was Ben permanently exiled from the island when he moved the wheel? Was he trying to fake the island out into letting him return by killing Locke and coming in his place?
• Did Ben plan to kill Locke all along, or was it the mention of Eloise Hawking that set him off?
• Where are Sun and Sayid in the post-Ajira timeline?

What was iffy:

• The new crash survivors. It's too late for new characters, haven't we already learned this?
• Flashbacks to the dysfunctional oceanic six. Just painful. Jerk Jack. Crazy Hurley. Mean Girl Kate.
  
• Sayid as a happy, healthy, habitat-for-humanity guy in the jungle. Where'd that come from?
  

Lost Returns

The return of Lost is something to be celebrated and embraced, like the return of Spring or the start of a new football season. It's just good. Don't judge. Don't argue. Just enjoy.

At this point the plot is so byzantine, complicated, and now self-referential that there's really no point analyzing all the cool ways last night's double episode stretched and folded on itself (I'll leave that to others). I will say that the story was surprisingly coherent, and they went out of their way to summarize and explain everything so that you could still keep up even if you weren't paying attention. Heck, Hurley summarized the entire plot up till now in just a few sentences which left me thinking that there haven't really been that many big events -- it just feels like there have been. Anyway, I also appreciated the fact that even though we're now lost in all four dimensions (and not just three), the jumps were easy to follow and the clues allowed us to understand when we were at all times.

Overall, the new episodes kicked things off with a bang, and I'm looking forward to where we go from here.

New Lost Promo Almost as Exciting as Vulture's Excitement Over Said Promo

Vulture says:

With a little more than a month before the show is set to relaunch, ABC just released a brand-new promo that features tons of tantalizing new footage that will surely get Losties worked up into a tizzy. A monk scribbling formulas on a blackboard! A man plummeting off a balcony! Some dude completely engulfed in flames! But best of all, the clip features someone who sounds suspiciously like Locke … wait for it … talking backward*! Did turning that frozen donkey wheel make the island merge with the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? We can't wait to find out!

Neither can I.

Quote of the Day

No Lost movie:

We’ve always felt that the show should definitively end the same place it started… on television. To bring our characters to some sort of cliffhanger where the audience gets none of the answers that they really care about and then say, “Now give us ten bucks, buy some popcorn and we’ll give you the rest!” would pretty much be the worst thing ever. -- Damon Lindelof, renewing my faith in the show and its writers.

Jeremy Bentham Lives

The Lost finale was all any fan could ask for. Lots of great stuff, and plenty of new mysteries for next year. Let the deconstructing begin.

Lost - The Shape of Things To Come

If you want to read a witty recap of last night's Lost, you can go here. I just want to get this out there before I read it somewhere else:

Charles Widmore must be Ben's "constant."

I'll also second everyone's reactions to Alex's fate, the smoke-opalypse, and the morse code business.

Cloverfield, aka 01-18-08

The whole Cloverfield thing has some pretty crafty marketing and the trailer has a crazy 9/11 feel to it. But here's my question: when have you ever heard of a bigtime hollywood movie being released in January? Isn't that when the studios usually dump movies they have no hope for?

It is however a good time for mid-season television, including the premier of Lost Season 4. I think Touchstone produces Lost, so that means this isn't a tie-in to the off-island conclusion of season 3. On the other hand, just think of how cool it would be to have this sort of monster movie mayhem as a consequence of all that's happened on the island.

Anyway, whatever's going on here, Paramount and Abrams are trying something pretty radical: secret greenlighting, no title, and an odd release date. Something tells me that there's more to it and I'm thinking it's TV related.

A Message From Ben "Henry" Linus

At New York Magazine, a short interview with Michael Emerson:

Now that the finale has aired, do you have any freaking clue what’s going to happen when you start shooting again?

No, because I didn't know what the end of the episode was until I watched it. That was a secret scene with Jack and Kate — only Matthew [Fox] and Evangeline [Lilly] were given that text and it was shot in secret. I had to wait until last night to have this earth-shattering revelation: Now not only are we going to live in the present and the past, but also the future. And the little things they dropped made my hair stand on end!

Lost - "Through the Looking Glass"

Sometimes it's all about the execution.

I was completely spoiled for the finale, knew all the major plot points including the big head twister at the end, and still I was enthralled with the entire thing. From start to finish I was completely engaged and guessing and second-guessing what I thought I knew.

A lot of that has to do with how focused the story was this week. They had a lot of story-telling to do and they were very smart and efficient with the way they went about it. Even scenes that sounded stupid on paper played on the screen (Locke in despair, Hurley to rescue in the Dharma bus, Jack the pill popping loser). And scenes that sounded good were even better (Charlie in the Looking Glass, Rousseau and Alex united, Kate and Jack at the end). Best yet, I was totally fooled into thinking Sayid, Bernard, and Jin were all dead. Fell for it lock, stock and barrell. Now that's good.

In the end, it also helped me to refine some of my thoughts from yesterday. Because more than any other episode, we were reminded of what it was that the lostaways have been wanting from the beginning. Their goal was never to solve the island's mysteries. It was to go home. Pure and simple. They didn't care about hatches, or Dharma, or smoke monsters. They wanted to survive long enough to go home. And all along that goal has been at odds with the audience's desires.

Now at last we see a classic end-of-the-second-act moment. Jack has realized that he was pursuing the wrong goal all along. He has hit rock bottom because he was focused on escape when he should have been looking for the deeper meanings of the island. Now he wants to go back. Now he is one of us.

When he tells Kate about his random flights and the golden ticket, Jack really makes you believe that he is willing the plane to crash. He really wants that next disaster to sweep him back to Oz, like Dorothy stormchasing tornadoes.

Over the summer and into the fall we'll have plenty of time to wonder about whose funeral it was that moved Jack, and who it was Kate needed to get back to so urgently. We'll also wonder about the fates of the other survivors, the others, and the temple that they going to. But the most important thing that came out of the episode was Jack's realization that he, like us, wants to find the answers that only the island can provide.

Lost Prehash With Spoilers

Here's a thoughtful article in Salon on the pleasures of watching Lost. Namely that mysteries and puzzles are more fun than answers and solutions.

The real problem with Lost is that there is not an actual main character. Jack and Kate trade the role of protagonist back and forth, sometimes sharing it with Locke, but none of these characters is what you would call (in Dramatica terms) a Main Character. There isn't anyone on the island that we identify with and there isn't anyone through whose eyes we see the events unfolding. The most sympathetic character is Hurley, but again he's just a nice guy, not the main character.

For the audience, the point of the show is to solve the mystery. But there is no stand-in for us in the show; no one is actively trying to solve the mystery. In season 1 it looked like it would be Locke, as our resident Sherlock Holmes, with Boone as our Dr. Watson stand in. Locke would pursue the greater truth, and Boone would be there to ask pertinent questions.

But that never really developed. Boone was "sacrificed" to the island (not exactly what Holmes would do to Watson), and Locke went soft in the head. The rudderlessness of the show has continued ever since. Occasionally, things happen that allow us to place our hopes on Desmond or Sayid, but from one week to the next there is no consistency. The show is built around the flashbacks, which work well, but also serve to undermine our POV.

And maybe that's how they want it. The problem is that it forces the diehards to go outside the show looking for answers: The Lost Experience and Lostpedia, as well as the Bible, books referenced by the show, and the odd use of philosophers for character names. Speculation can also be part of the fun. Spinning wild scenarios in message boards to explain the clues is actually more entertaining than watching the show (the same thing happened with the Star Wars Prequels. It was more exciting speculating on the movies at Ain't It Cool News than seeing the finished products).

Speaking of speculation, here is my take on the so-called "game changer". If we do indeed flash forward, then the present action will extend to the world post-island, and the flashbacks will give us information about the island and how they escaped (this didn't work very well on "The 9" but oh well). At this point I think the writers have concluded that the pre-Island stories have been told and there isn't much left to hash out in flashbacks. Locke's backstory has been told, Sawyer's story has been resolved, we know what Kate did, we know about Jack ad nauseum, we know about Jin and Sun's marriage. It's done. To keep things moving they need an opportunity to extend the story and the only way to go is into the future.

So ultimately the game changer won't help us solve the island's mysteries, but it will provide the writer's with a convenient way to keep the show going. After tonight, they'll have 48 hours to show us why Jack wants Kate to go back to the island.

Lost - "Greatest Hits"

How can a show be both so entertaining and so completely dumb all at the same time? [Note to self -- don't act like you've never watched TV before!] Now that I'm no longer concerning myself with the overall mythology and have sworn off any and all interest in the big "game changer" the show is more fun to watch, but still. Once it was over I thought to myself, what a completely dumb sequence of events.

• Not content to just come up with a plan involving dynamite, Jack must demonstrate to everyone else his mastery over exploding trees (and Danielle let's him! Yeesh).
• Booby trapping the tents? Why not just blow up the whole beach?
• Isn't Charlie like a really bad swimmer?
  
• Had the Looking Glass been flooded, Charlie would most certainly have run out of air before he'd found the yellow button.
• Plus, based on the preview none of it works anyway. Doesn't anyone remember the last two season finales where the Others pulled the old-switcheroo at the last second.
  
• Obviously the whole raid on the beach thing is a trick. Ben knew he couldn't trust Juliet and he knows how gullible Jack is when he plays leader.

But to be fair, that was an incredibly fun episode to watch and Charlie was brilliant in every scene. He really had you choked up as he went through his five greatest moments, ending with meeting Claire on the beach. His goodbye to Hurley was nice as well. Every moment of his swim was completely believable and suspenseful: the determination, the panic when he couldn't find the moon pool, the relief when he swam up for air, the cry of joy at being alive. Awesome.

Overall a great episode, and I really need to let go of my need to make everything logical. It will probably drive everyone crazy, but next week's two hour finale is going to be huge.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update

After seeing the previews, Lost fans are declaring the spoilers for the finale to be foilers. It's hilarious. Their battle cry is SHENANIGANS!

Lost Prehash - Bitterness Fiesta with Possible Spoilers

The second half of season 3 has been surprisingly good, and as far as I'm concerned has even surpassed the once unstoppable juggernaut of Heroes. In recent weeks the show has been intriguing, surprising, thought-provoking and a pure pleasure to watch.

But now the pressure is on. And I'm afraid Lost may be setting itself up for a fall it won't be able to recover from. Remember how bad Battlestar Galactica was in its finale? This could be worse.

The problem is two-fold. The producers and the fans.

On the one hand we have the producers, Damon and Carlton, making big promises about the season finale. They are calling it a game-changer. They have given it a cheesy codename (the rattlesnake in the mailbox). They are comparing the show to Star Wars. Basically they are going out of their way to disappoint us.

Then we have the fans and the fan sites and the discussion forums trying to beat Damon and Carlton at their own game. Not content to theorize about what might happen, they are circulating spoilers and foilers trying to tell people what will happen.

If D&C think they have a season ender that will blow our minds and show us something completely unexpected, they will be disappointed by the fan reaction. Based on the unsubsidized theorizing of fan sites I've seen, there isn't much that Lost can do that hasn't been kicked around a few million times by the diehards.

• Remember when the big magnet in the hatch was being used to imprison a powerful telepath named Aaron?
• Remember when the island was a social experiment run by the Dharma initiative to see who would do things like push a button for no reason?
• Remember when the crash was staged, and everyone had been kidnapped and placed on the island for some nefarious purpose?
• Remember when the smoke monster was made of nano-bots?
  
• Remember when everyone was dead and stuck in purgatory?

Those theories at least were honest attempts to account for all the clues that had been dropped by watching the show.

But Damon and Carlton's strategy has been to add on new complications and mysteries rather than resolve old ones. How have they done this? By consistently opening up the show to more characters, more locations, more back stories, and more conflicts.

• In Season 1 we had one group of survivors, in Season 2 we had two groups of survivors.
• In Season 1 we met the Others. In Season 2 we met the Others and the Dharma Initiative. In Season 3 we met the Others, the Dharma Initiative, and the Hostiles.
• In Seasons 1 and 2 we had one island. In Season 3 we have two islands.
• In Seasons 1 and 2 we had one Flight 815, in Season 3 we have two.
• In Seasons 1 and 2 we had no contact with the outside world. Now we have Penny and the Brazilian guys in arctic, and Naomi and her ship offshore, and the Dharma submarine shuttling back and forth, and Walt and Michael sailing off, and so forth.

So instead of addressing the issues from the original premise, the show keeps getting bigger, and bigger is not an answer; it's a dodge.

This brings us to the finale. There are essentially two spoiler/foilers going around which are meant to be the big game changer:

1. We have the return of the Dharma Initiative and the reveal of the Eye station which has continued to operate underground, hidden from both the survivors and the Others who were mere pawns in some larger game. The big reveal will be that Jack was placed by them in the jungle after the crash and that he is the key to some grand unifying conspiracy.

2. We flash forward to Jack and Kate in the present day, having escaped from the island, trying to get back to right some wrong. The game changer is that it reverses the original premise. Flashbacks now refer back to the island and the goal is to get to the island rather than escape from it.

Both of these scenarios are about as exciting as watching Ben argue with an empty chair. They don't deepen the mystery or explain a larger world view. They just obfuscate it by moving our point of view and our sympathies around the board. More importantly none of this gives us any clues as to:

• How everyone survived the crash in the first place.
• Why the island has healing abilities for some and not for others.
• What the monster is.
• Why some people see hallucinations.
• What the purpose of the numbers is or was.
• Why so many people with connections were all on the same flight.
• What the purpose of the Swan station was.
• Why Desmond appears to be able to time travel and predict future events.
• Why Libby was in the asylum with Hurley and whether or not she remembered him.
• Why some of the crash survivors were taken and why they integrated into Other society so easily.
• Why the strong polar bear motif throughout season 1 if the bears were not actually hallucinations but real bears escaped from Dharma.
• Why Walt was so important.
• Why Jack is so important.
• Why everyone on the island suffers from a rotten father figure in the past.
• Why the outside world believes that 815 was found with no survivors.
• Why mothers who conceive on the island die.
• Who or what Jacob is.
• How did Yemi's plane end up on the island.
• How did the Blackrock end up on the island.
• Why couldn't Desmond sail away from the island.
• Why is there a four-toed statue on the island.
• Who are the Brazilian guys in the arctic.
• Why does Penny want to find Desmond.
  

There are some who may think my list is unfair and that we have gotten answers to some of these. All I can say is that no one in the show has ever mentioned the Valenzetti Equation. Doesn't count.

Given all that, can we really expect that any of these questions will be acknowledged much less answered in the next two weeks? More importantly, is there any reason to expect that ALL of these questions will be answered by 2010? That would be "no" and "doubtful".

D&C seem to want to emphasize a "game-changer" so that they can break away from these questions, or at least make them irrelevant to whatever new story they'll be telling us in the next three years. Either way, the end of Season 3 may mean the end of Lost as we knew it, and the beginning of something that few of us ever wanted to see. It didn't work for Alias to jump forward. It didn't work for Battlestar Galactica. The game-changer is a bad idea that does more harm than good.

Lost - "The Man Behind The Curtain"

Everything about this episode was great, with the exception of the two big super secret scenes that the powers that be and the internet refused to spoil. So whether or not you liked the episode depends on how you took those two scenes.

For me, the scene with "Jacob" was much less than I'd hoped for, and the final scene between Ben and Locke was a lot more than I was expecting.

One thing we did get out of this episode, is that Ben is completely psychotic, so regardless of what else is going on around him, he's not to be trusted, nor should we expect him to give a full accounting of what's "really" happening.

The internets are buzzing because there are images of "Jacob" in the scene in the cabin if you freeze frame. So Ben may not have been talking to an empty chair after all. Maybe he was talking to a ghost (but who's ghost? Black Rock pirate, Christian Shepard, alternate universe Locke?). Or it was just part of the hocus pocus; an illusion to help Ben sell his long con. After all, spiritualists are capable of all sorts of very convincing displays during a seance. Doesn't mean they are real.

I'm starting to think that the point of Lost is not that there is an ultimate reality that will be revealed to us by 2010, but that there are cons big and small. Sometimes you're a thief, sometimes you're a doctor, and sometime you're a wizard. Regardless, your stock and trade is in the willingness of people to believe whatever story you're telling them is absolutely true. This is the way of the world, according to the show, so long as you ignore the man behind the curtain.

The fun of the show is our willingness to believe that Lost has answers to ultimately meaningless questions like "who is Jacob?"

Lost Prehash - Speculation Without Spoilers

I have high expectations for tonight's episode (which should be obvious since I'm pre-blogging). It's the episode where we learn about Ben's past and perhaps the origins of the Others. More importantly, we've been promised that we'll learn who Jacob is, and Locke will hear two words that will radically change his view of the island.

The speculation has been crazy so far. Jacob is:

• Jack
• A doll
• Richard
• The Smoke Monster
• Joop the Orangutan
• Vincent the dog
• A figment of Ben's imagination
• Locke

Anyway, you can pretty much go anywhere with this stuff. For me, the most likely answer will be one that leads to the big showdown between Jack and Locke that is supposed to happen in the finale.

Lost - "The Brig"

Once Locke shows up looking for Sawyer, the rest of the episode takes on the satisfying inevitability of Greek Tragedy. We know that Locke has his father and not Ben prisoner, and we know that Locke has connected the dots between Cooper and Sawyer, and that once they meet James Ford will connect those same dots with terrible results.

The audience for Lost is well prepared for sudden and surprising revelations, but not for the consequences of those revelations. We don't know what to make of the drama that grows out of the answers we're always waiting for - especially when this was a connection that many people guessed at in Season 1 when Cooper was introduced. Instead, we just want to get on to the next big secret. But the writers are dedicated to the drama, and because Sawyer has become one of the more compelling characters on the show, this episode was done exceedingly well.

The question for Sawyer is, what now? Is he now free of his past, or have his actions condemned him?

Also of interest:

• Cooper and Naomi both told the same story of the crashed flight 815.
• The comedy of manners between Locke and Rousseau on the Black Rock. Dynamite?
• Sayid let in on the secret of Naomi's arrival. He's smart enough to be suspicious of her and smart enough to see the value of a satellite phone.
• Kate childishly running to Jack. She's desperate for his approval, and I'm guessing she'll never have it.
• What is Jack and Juliet's big secret? Do they know how to reach Naomi's ship, or do they know that she is from the Dharma Initiative?
• There is no magic box. That was just Ben manipulating Locke. Clearly, they kidnapped Cooper and brought him to the island.
  
• Next week we get Ben's backstory.
  

The latest theory:

• Ben and the Others were originally part of the Dharma Initiatives' experiments until Jacob led a revolt.
• The Others use DI's tools to undo the harm done by years of experimentation.
• The Smoke Monster is a former security system that has gained sentience.
• The secrecy of the Others is to keep DI from retaking the island.
• The people they have taken, including the children, are people they know for certain are NOT Dharma.
• Ben and the Others keep files on the survivors and test them in order to determine who might be Dharma agents.
  
• Penny Whidmore is the leader of the Dharma Initiative.
• Does Ben suspect that Juliet really is a mole? For Dharma?
• Was Rousseau and her team from Dharma?