'Lost' scoop: Juliet mystery (sort of) solved

May 18, 2009, 11:52 PM by Michael Ausiello

And now for some news that should surprise no one: ABC is expected to announce tomorrow that it has picked up a reboot of the camptastic '80s thriller V and that Lost heroine Elizabeth Mitchell is a full-time castmember.

Translation: She will not be returning to Lost as a series regular.

However, before you go declaring Juliet DOA from last week's detonated hydrogen bomb, I should point out that this piece of scoop comes with a big but attached: Mitchell's Lost days are not done. Multiple sources confirm that the actress is expected to appear in an unspecified number of episodes next season, so it's entirely possible Juliet survived Jughead and her absence will be explained in another way. (Check out Doc Jensen's column this Wednesday for a comprehensive Juliet theorypalooza.)
http://ausiellofiles.ew.com/2009/05/lost-scoop-juli.html

EW: Doc Jensen: 'Lost' Recap: Taking Charge

While Jack tries once again to save them all, Locke embarks on a mission of his own

IN SYNC? Kate could not get behind Jack's plan to erase their history


By Jeff Jensen
''Follow The Leader,'' the episode instructed, but what are you supposed to do if your leaders are off-their-Jacob-rockers crazy? Here's Jack Shephard, wild-eyed destiny zealot, determined to detonate an H-bomb hidden in the ancient tunnels of the Island in order to produce a paradox that will rewrite history. Crazy. And Kate let him know it, revolting and vowing to work against him, though he gained an ally in ''My Life Sucks'' Sayid. Here's John Locke, glowing with a supreme, even ethereal self-confidence that felt downright disconcerting, driving his tribe of wilderness-wandering Others toward a face-to-face meeting with their mercurial and never-seen god, Jacob. Crazy. And Richard Alpert and Benjamin Linus were freaked out about it — but Sun was willing to roll behind Locke if he could lead her back to Jin. (But will he? Does he even want to? Who is this creepy man-thing dressed up in John Locke's skin?) I loved the beat before the final BONG!, when Ben threw Alpert under the bus and pretended to pledge allegiance to Locke — classic Ben, trying to gain control by sewing seeds of doubt and chaos — only to have Locke blow up his scheming by dropping the J-bomb on him. I'm gonna go kill Jacob. Ben's bug eyes practically popped out of his skull. On one hand, it was thrilling to see Jack and John large and in charge. They acted like heroes...but we were left with the unsettling possibility that their respective endeavors will make them out to be horrible, misery-producing villains by season's end. And there remains the haunting prospect that both are actually being played by puppet masters hiding in the shadows...or even walking among them in plain sight.

''Follow The Leader'' deftly mobilized bunches of characters and established at least three juicy conflicts — Jughead, Jacob, and the jealousy-drizzled submarine sandwich that is Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate — that should make for many fireworks in next week's two-hour finale. At the same time, the episode kept things so cryptic, I really have zero clues where the heck this season is going to land — and boy, do I like not knowing. (Attention Lostfan108: Stay the frak away from me, or I swear by Jacob's Flickering Beard, I shall hunt you down and beat you to death with Montand's stiff, severed arm.) Moreover, the episode was steeped in veiled references to yet another fabled fantasy about young heroes stumbling into an enchanted otherworld — presuming, of course, that ''Follow The Leader'' is indeed a direct nod to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. The game of the same name is central to the story line of the author's play and book; a song of the same name is part of Walt Disney's beloved 1953 animated musical adaptation. These various versions intersect with Lost in any number of ways: magical islands inhabited by peculiar tribes of people working at cross-purposes, death and resurrection, ticking bombs, lost boys, never-aging enchanted beings, and more. Peter Pan gives us ''The Peter Pan Complex,'' describing maturity-challenged adults who can't deal with reality and so try to change it (see: Jack), not to mention ''The Tinker Bell Effect,'' which according to Wikipedia ''describes those things that exist only because people believe in them'' — things like ''a rule of law'' (see: Horace Goodspeed, ''We have a rule of law!'') and ''deities'' (See: Jacob).

Lost loves citing fantasy literature like this at the end of the season (see: Season 3, Alice in Wonderland; Season 4, The Wizard of Oz), so it's not too farfetched to consider the prospect that Peter Pan might hold a clue about the tenor and texture of how Season 5 will end. I would say you'd find such a clue, appropriately, in Chapter 5, entitled ''The Island Come True,'' in which Tinker Bell plays 'follow the leader' with Wendy, and guides her to a relatively safe part of Neverland following an attack by Captain Hook...where she betrays Wendy horribly by setting her up to be killed by the Lost Boys. (Tink, you see, was intensely jealous of the hold Wendy had on Peter's heart.)

And so, of the great many things that ''Follow The Leader'' put into motion for next week's finale, consider the possibility that a brutal and bloody betrayal might be one of them. Will it be Eloise Hawking (1970s wet hottie edition) double-crossing Jack? Will it be Ben screwing over Locke? Or might the fiend be Lost's only certifiable enchanted being, the Island's own Tinker Bell, and the one character who played leader to both Jack and Locke in last night's episode? Yes, Richard Alpert, I'm calling you out. Don't let those gorgeous eyeliner eyes and that beleaguered countenance fool you, my friends. He's playing a game. I know he is. But what the hell is it?

THE END OF THE AFFAIRS Jack and Kate; Eloise and Charles?
The Jughead plan is totally ridiculous. I finally realized that last night. Jack Shephard is going to save the day by...detonating a hydrogen bomb? Seriously?! It would be nice if the show gave Jack one moment of ironic detachment to acknowledge: I can't believe I'm doing this. I used to be a spinal surgeon. Now I'm freakin' Dr. Strangelove. Still, I'm totally in. This is what happens when ordinary people get sucked into Wonderland or Neverland or Narnia — they do extraordinary things. Some fantasy heroes wage war with magic swords; others use thermonuclear weapons. Same dif. I also think the Jughead/paradox gambit meshes well, if ironically, with how Lost has used time travel in general to enhance and embellish its core theme of redemption...but I intend to expound on that next week.

Regardless, Jack's zealous pursuit of meaning is totally reminiscent of early Lost Locke, the guy so desperate for significance he could see grand purpose in...pushing a button every 108 minutes. Which actually ended up having a grand purpose. Still: crazy. Just like this Jughead thing. Even Kate thought so. In fact, if the former fugitive/current parole breaker does wind up with Sawyer, I'll bet you 1,000 Monopoly dollars that we all look back and say that this was the pivotal point in that decision-making process, inasmuch as finally giving up on Jack. His rationale for finishing what Faraday started broke her heart.

JACK: What if this is our one chance to put things back the way they were supposed to be?
KATE: And what about us? We go on living our lives as if we've never me?
JACK: All the misery that we've been through, we'd just wipe it clean. Never happened.
KATE: It was not all misery!
JACK: Enough of it was.
For Jack, history is not just a terminally ill pet that needs to be put down — it's a mutant runt that was never supposed to be. He would rather take a gamble on a new world he doesn't know than the crap world that he does know. His plan is Quantum Suicide by Oppenheimer — ''Behold, Doc Shephard, part Shiva, part Dr. Kevorkian!'' From his narrow perspective — one clearly scarred by all the folks who've died on his watch as Castaway Moses — rebooting time would bring back all those he lost. Boone. Shannon. Ana Lucia. Libby. Charlie. Michael. More. But his haunted self-involvement is so epically solipsistic and myopic, he can't see what his mad quest for a historical clean slate would cost those still living — especially his would-be girlfriend. For Kate, the castaway adventure has been painful and hard — but it has also given her so much, from a community of friends to the experience of mothering Aaron to Jack himself. To hear him blather on about obliterating the events that brought them together — I mean, that's almost like a boyfriend breaking up with you and bitterly saying, ''I wish we had never met — and now I shall ask my magic genie to make it so!'' (To Jack's small defense, he is proceeding from a point of view that Kate never really dug old Jack's cheese; see ''Whatever Happened, Happened.'')

Moreover — and I think this idea is richly twisted — Jack's plan would take away something even more important to the castaways. From the very beginning of Lost, we've been encouraged to consider these characters as fallen people desperate for redemption, or at least a fresh start. Jack's plan is a shortcut to absolution. It would also negate the redemption and happily-ever-afters that his castaway friends have achieved. (See: Sawyer and Juliet.) But Jack did find an ally in self-loathing Sayid, who popped up just in time to pop a cap in one of the Others who wanted to shoot Kate lest she skip back to Dharma and spill their secrets, such as the aquatic entrance to the Tunnels. Sayid had previously tried to collapse the time-space continuum by killing Big Bad Ben, and he proudly boasted of accomplishing the feat to Kate. But then she went and punctured his balloon with the whole I-saved-him thing. ''Why would you do that?'' he asked sadly. And so he joined Jack's crusade to finish the job he started. I was glad to see Sayid back; I was worried there for a sec that Season 5 was done with him. I was also glad to see that at some point during his days on the lamb in the jungle he had lost that purple shirt.

Jack's Jughead quest also provided some insight into the combustible interpersonal dynamics of the Other's reigning power couple, Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore. It was pretty clear which one wore the pants in the relationship — and it wasn't the dude with the curly girly hair. The most interesting scene between the two was the one we weren't allowed to hear. You noticed that, right? It came soon after Eloise asked Alpert for some privacy while she and Widmore paid their last respects to Daniel; I got the sense that either ageless Richard and whatever he represents wasn't welcome to observe this human, mortal moment, or that Eloise simply needed an excuse to discuss something important with Widmore outside of earshot. As an exasperated Alpert untied Jack and Kate, Chuck and Ellie argued in whispers. Asked to explain the relationship between the two Brits, Richard said, ''Well, let's just say that love can be complicated.'' Not only were we not permitted to listen, but also at one point, the camera dollied behind an Other, conspicuously blocking our view of them. My guess is that we will soon revisit this conversation, and we will hear what they said, and we will realize that something of great significance went down in that moment. My prediction? This was the moment of their break-up. Eloise wanted to pursue Operation: Jughead; Widmore told her he'd dump her ass if she did; and so it went. CREEPY OBSERVATION OF THE WEEK! Was it just me, or did you, too, get a brother/sister vibe from these two, too? I like to think they were once akin to the Narnia/Pan/Potter kids, who fell into this enchanted world and never wanted to leave...but not only did that not work out, staying as long they did came at a spiritually corrupting cost.

Confronted with the revelation that she had just killed her own son, Eloise agreed to help Jack destroy the timeline in hopes of rectifying her mistake. Interesting: She told Jack and Kate she was 17 years old when she escorted time-traveling Faraday at gunpoint to the Jughead drop zone back in 1954. That would make her 40 years old in 1977. So I'm going to say that Boy Daniel Faraday was alive back in the year of Adult Daniel Faraday's death on the Island. Moreover, remember the 9-year-old Faraday playing the piano in last week's episode? I'm going to say that that moment happened right after the Dharma-times events depicted in the last few episodes. In my recap of ''The Variable,'' I wondered why Ellie entered the room in tears. Perhaps that scene represented the first time she had seen young Faraday since killing older Faraday; and perhaps her tears were an indication that her attempt at eradicating her mistake by helping Jack blow up Jughead had failed. We shall see next week.

The Jack branch of ''Follow The Leader'' terminated in the underworld of the Island. ''The Tunnels,'' Richard called them. Like the underbelly of the Temple, the walls of this labyrinth were covered with hieroglyphics. Egyptian, presumably. Lost cryptographers, start your decoding and get the results posted, ASAP. Eloise explained that she and her fellow Others had stowed Jughead in the Tunnels after Team Faraday's visit — in a spot that now sits directly below Dharmaville. (So much for my ''in the shadow of the statue'' guess.) I suddenly recalled ''Dead Is Dead,'' and the scene in which Ben crawled the corridor behind his glyph door, unplugged that basin, and yelled down the pipes to...someone. Someone who might have been making their home in the very room where Jughead was chillin' like a villain back in '77. FUN FACT! The episode was called ''Follow The Leader'' — and ''leader'' is another word for the drainage pipe or downspout that's attached the gutters of a house. So maybe, like, there's an ancient ziggurat under Dharmaville, and Ben's secret bedroom corridor actually runs along its the roof. Or something.

There was much intrigue generated around the whole issue of how the Others got Jughead down there. It certainly wasn't through the tight canal of that under-the-waterfall entrance. ''It's a 12-foot long, 40,000-pound hydrogen bomb,'' quipped Alpert. ''No, not through the pool.'' So: Where's the secret wide-mouth hatch that the Others used to get Jughead into the Tunnels? How about...in the shadow of the statue? I'm telling you, one way or another, I'm gonna make this work!

Jughead Jack didn't have the monopoly on dangerously crazed leadership in this episode. Over in Dharmaville, Radzinsky bumped wimpy hippie Horace Goodspeed aside and established himself as the Colonel Custer of this far west Dharma Initiative outpost. Hellbent on warring with the Others — ostensibly to rescue Young Ben, though I get the sense Radzinsky would just as soon as see the Island's indigenous ''Hostiles'' purged altogether — Mad Rad beat Sawyer bloody in order to get him to cough up the Others' jungle address. Yet for all of Radzinsky's knuckle sandwiches and security-monitor face smushing, Sawyer gave the follically challenged tyrant nothing but quips. ''I want a lawyer,'' he joked. But he changed his tune once his old stooge Phil — pissy from spending an episode tied up in Sawyer's closet — began slapping Juliet around. (Importing some misogyny from actor Patrick Fischler's Mad Man stint as caustic comedian Jimmy Barrett.) And so Sawyer cut a deal: the location of the Others in exchange for passage off the Island for both himself and Juliet. (Shades of: Sawyer selling out another inmate to get an early release from prison in the aptly named Season 3 episode ''Every Man For Himself.'')

The sequence in which Sawyer and Juliet strolled down the pier toward the sub had a gut-twisting, walking-the-plank kind of suspense. I kept waiting for something bad to happen — for one of the Others to renege on the deal and kill them, or perhaps just split them up, letting Juliet join the women and children in evacuating the Island but forcing Sawyer behind. But then, after insisting that Juliet board the sub first like the southern gentleman that he is, I was gripped by the notion that he was going to kick the lid shut and stay behind of his own accord. After all, Sawyer was basically abandoning Miles, Jin, and Hurley to an uncertain fate at the hands of Madman Radzinsky, and he would never do that. Right? What was it that Hurley said? ''We have to save him, because Sawyer would never leave us behind.''

But he did. Sawyer made a show of muttering ''Good riddance'' toward the Island and then descended down into a sub, thus sealing the deal on the apparent sell-out of his castaway friends. I say ''apparent,'' because I refuse to believe Sawyer — who had been heroically born again as a hero and leader during his Dharma idyll — would really leave his pals high and dry. I'm guessing Mr. LaFleur, being Dharma's security honcho and all, knows the sub's departure protocol — and I'm betting that it includes a stop at Dharma's underwater Looking-Glass station before it leaves the Island's vicinity. I'm thinking it's here where Sawyer will make his move. And given how in sync he and Juliet are, I think Mrs. LaFleur knows exactly what her super-cool common law hubby has in mind. ''Don't worry,'' Hurley said. ''Sawyer always has a plan.''

Besides, he's gotta go back and make good on his threat to kill Phil. Nobody slaps Sawyer's girl around. Nobody.

This is thinking the romantic best of Sawyer. The other, less flattering possibility: Sawyer got onto the sub with no master plan to save his friends and with every intention of putting the Island behind him — but Kate will tell him about Crazy Jack's H-bomb gambit, which will inspire Sawyer to reverse course and initiate Operation: Looking-Glass, which Juliet will go along with because she, too, ain't that heartless, but the whole thing will cause her to doubt Sawyer's loyalty to her, thus putting in motion the inevitable implosion of their relationship, which has to happen, anyway, because... well, if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean. And if you don't know what I mean, then you'll certainly know by next week.

''To die will be an awfully big adventure.''
– Peter Pan

The John Locke arc was chockablock with cryptic bits of business ripe for message board discussion — many of them pertaining to the ageless enigma that is Richard Alpert. For starters, we saw him building a ''ship in a bottle,'' a type of mechanical puzzle known as ''an impossible bottle.'' The moment will surely feed the well-heeled theory that Alpert is either a descendant of the Black Rock castaways, if not a miraculously death-challenged survivor of the slave ship's crew. (Or one of the imprisoned human cargo.) Or perhaps it's merely a metaphor for himself: something ancient, trapped inside the timeless bottle that is the Island. FUN FACT! ''Ship In A Bottle'' is a famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from its sixth season in which an unreal Holodeck character — Professor Moriarty, enemy to Sherlock Holmes — takes over the Enterprise and conspires to find a way to exist in the real world. ALSO SEE: Doc Jensen's first Lost theory, The Evil Aaron Hypothesis, which put forth that a powerful, disembodied supernatural agency had taken control of the Island and has been conspiring to bring about his or her physical incarnation.

We also learned Alpert's title. ''He's a kind of...advisor,'' Ben told Sun, a long pause preceding that word ''advisor.'' ''And he has had that job for a very, very long time.'' In other words, Richard is kind of like Tinker Bell, an Island sprite that serves the lost boys (and girls) who wash up on the island of Neverland and aspire to become its next Peter Pans. FUN FACT! Tinker Bell's name, according to Barrie's book, is a reference to ''tinkers'' — artisans charged with fixing broken pots and pans. Is that what Richard is trying to do? Fix something? The Island? Jacob? Then again, maybe Alpert is Pan himself — specifically, the Greek god Pan, who, like Tinker Bell, was a sidekick to bigger gods. To the Greeks, Pan was the god of shepherds, which fits Alpert. To older traditions, Pan was an attendant or agent — an ''advisor,'' if you will — to Cybele, the great mother goddess. FUN FACT! There's a maze of tunnels under the Island — and there's a Guillermo Del Toro movie called Pan's Labyrinth that includes a fairytale about an underworld princess who escapes her realm and dies, and yet leaves her father with hope that she may be resurrected and live again, forever....

See? Isn't this fun?

Quickly: Locke tracked down the Others and brought a gift of boar for their supper. (Season 1 John The Hunter, back in the hizzee! — Did I really write ''hizzee''?) Richard was agog by Locke's return. From his relative position in the time-space continuum, he hadn't seen Locke since he vanished after Ben turned the frozen donkey wheel — and that was three years ago. ''There's something different about you,'' Alpert said. It was as if he could smell the underworldly aroma of resurrection wafting off him — and it smelled scary and wrong, like one of the critters that crawled out of Stephen King's Pet Cemetery. Locke just beamed. ''I have a purpose now,'' he replied, and asked Alpert to join him on an important errand…Ben, too.

BEN: ''What's wrong, John? Afraid I'll stage a coup?''
JOHN: ''I'm not afraid of anything you can do anymore, Ben.''
BEN, dripping sarcasm: ''Well, in that case, I'd love to come.''

Hilarious. The Ben and Locke Comedy Hour was in full, droll effect.

Locke took the former Others power couple out to the drug plane so they could bear witness to a miracle: The sight of time-traveling Locke stumbling out of the jungle, wounded from Ethan's gunshot. New (But Improved?) Resurrected Locke instructed Alpert to tend to Old Wounded Time-Traveling Locke and pass along his compass and some crucial instructions, like the whole thing about needing to die to save his castaway friends, and in this way one of the trippy mystery moments from the season's fragmented first episode was rounded out and given context. Ironic: ''Follow The Leader'' gave us one arc in which Jack in the past schemes to produce paradox, and also gives us another arc in which John hustles to prevent paradox from occurring. (Specifically, Locke was trying to avoid what is known as a ''bootstrap paradox,'' involving the acquisition and replacement of objects and the receiving and imparting of information from future to past to future again. You can investigate at your leisure over at Wikipedia.)

Then, there was this loaded exchange.
BEN: ''This must be an out of body experience for you.''
LOCKE: ''Something like that.''
It spoke to the moment but made me wonder if Lost was also foreshadowing something to come. After all: Isn't Jacob a disembodied phenomenon? And haven't many speculated that Jacob will wind up being Locke himself?

Ben asked a burning question: How exactly did New (But Improved?) Resurrected Locke know that Old Wounded Time Traveling Locke would be arriving at this particular moment in Island history? ''The island told me,'' Locke said. But then he added, with a dollop of snark: ''The Island ever tell you anything?'' It was one of several moments in the episode where I couldn't tell if Locke was just sticking it to Ben — call it Operation: Humiliation, a continuation of Ben's humbling that began with his judgment by Smokey in ''Dead Is Dead'' — or if he was surreptitiously fishing for information about the extent of his Island powers. Conversely, I couldn't tell if Ben was genuinely shell-shocked by Locke's words and actions or if he was feigning surprise and thus feeding his ego in order to smoke out his true agenda. Indeed, the more Locke talked, the less surreal and more human he became. He demanded that he be taken to Jacob. Then, he poked at Ben with this: ''You've never seen him. Jacob. You've never seen him, have you?'' Ben was struck speechless — or was feigning speechlessness. I think it's very possible that Ben was running a con of cluelessness on Locke. He's come back to the Island with a Jacob fixation. Why? Give him the reactions he wants — make him feel in control and powerful — which will only embolden him to reveal more and more...

Back at the Others' teepee village, Locke did just that. He spoke to the Others and asked them if they'd be interested in joining him in visiting this never-seen god named Jacob who orders them around the Island via the proxies of Ben and Richard? ''Now, I'm sure there are very good reasons why his whereabouts are a secret, I just don't know what they are,'' Locke said. ''And to be honest with all of you, if there is a man telling us what to do, I want to know who he is.'' Correct me if I'm wrong, but did we just witness the completion of a profound role reversal on Lost? Because Locke's rhetoric is that of the rational skeptic, demanding empirical proof before committing his trust to some great and mighty Oz. Jack is now the man of faith; Locke is now the man of science.

Then Sun scampered up to him and delivered one of the cheesiest acting moments Yunjin Kim has ever committed to film: ''This man, Jacob? Can he tell us how to bring Jin and the rest of our people back here?'' Locke: ''Absolutely!'' It felt so forced I thought she and Locke had staged it for effect. When Locke finished, more cornball followed as he passed through the Others ranks, earning hammy head nods and cheesy back slaps from his admiring flock.

Maybe not the greatest scene Lost has ever staged, but at least it had a pretty killer kicker:

RICHARD: I'm starting to think John Locke is going to be trouble.
BEN: Why do you think I tried to kill him?

Watching Ben and Richard watch Locke's rise to power, I found myself recalling Season 3, when Ben offered Locke leadership of the Others, provided he could pass the rite of initiation: killing his father. At the time, Richard was all for the idea — he had grown wary of Ben's leadership due to his fixation with curing the Others' procreation problem — and when Locke refused to slay his pop, Richard helped him along by planting the idea of making Sawyer do the deed for him. Why was it so important to Richard that Locke kill his bad dad? The answer, it seemed, was that Locke needed to fully exorcise the demons of his past — most of which were bound up in his father — before he could become the Island's newest Pope.

Since Season 3, Locke has seen and experienced much, to the point where he seemed to be at peace with himself. In ''The Little Prince,'' he told Sawyer he had no interest in changing the past because ''I needed that pain to get to where I am now.'' And initially, it seemed that this strange new Resurrected Locke represented the completion of Locke's redemption project. But now, we must wonder. In the final moments of ''Follow The Leader,'' Locke not only confessed his Kill Jacob ambition, he admitted to Ben that he had lied to Sun; he has no interest in reuniting with the castaways or even saving them. Presuming he was being genuine with Ben and not running a mindgame on him, who is this new Locke really? Is he his own man? Are the same old issues that have always roiled his soul — the fury of being duped by fathers and cheated by fate — still fueling him? Or is he just a vessel controlled by other powers, some kind of Trojan horse created to infiltrate the ranks of the Others and assassinate their leader. But on behalf of whom? We are reminded again that there are ''teams'' and ''sides'' being drawn on the Island — and that wayyyy back in Season 2, Ben insisted to Michael that his Others ''were the good guys.'' So which side is Locke on: the side of angels or the side of demons? The side that will win — or the side that will lose?

What have I overlooked? A lot. I didn't talk about Pierre Chang and Miles. I didn't talk about the evacuation of the Island. I didn't talk about the LOL funny history quiz administered to Hurley. I didn't talk about why Dharma wants to drill into the electromagnetic anomaly at the Swan site. I didn't discuss further the oddly quiet year for Sun and what it might have to do with the time travel novel entitled The Year of The Quiet Sun. And I didn't discuss Alpert's claim that he watched all the time traveling castaways die right before his eyes back in 1977 — a claim that I suspect is either totally bogus or doesn't really tell the whole truth. But please, feel free to discuss these things for me in the boards below — and come back next Wednesday for very special year-end editions of Doc Jensen and ''Totally Lost.''

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid22084043001?bclid=22163156001&bctid=22195565001

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20277373,00.html

EW Doc Jensen: 'Lost': Long Ago and Faraday

Doc Jensen on tonight's ''Follow the Leader,'' where Jack takes up the idea to alter the past as a way to alter the future. Plus: A couple of comics connections, tickling the ivories, protons vs. photons, and a season-ending survey for ''Lost'' fans

By Jeff Jensen
'SHEPHERD OR SHEEP?
A preview of ''Follow the Leader''; a prospective eulogy for Daniel Faraday

He's dead. That's the word. No miracle resurrection like John Locke. No trips to the Temple for a restorative cure like Young Ben. Nope, this time, dead is dead. R.I.P. Daniel Faraday, survived by a pair of monstrous parents (presuming you believe Charles Widmore is indeed his pop) and bunches of unanswered questions. How did he know that Dr. Pierre Chang was Miles' father? Why was he so certain that his Mother Other would know how to get the castaways back to the present? What exactly was he doing for the Dharma Initiative back in Ann Arbor, Mich.? And what exactly did he mean back in the season premiere when he called Desmond ''uniquely and miraculously special''?

Last week, in my recap of ''The Variable,'' I noted that there seemed to be something calculated and intentional about his reckless chaos-making, and I speculated that Daniel may have blustered into the Others' tent city knowing exactly what was going to happen, and even wanting it to happen. I could be wrong — and I'll be fine if I am — but I think it would be cool if we learned there was more to Daniel's actions last week than meets the eye. According to the previews for tonight's episode, ''Follow the Leader,'' Jack will take up Project: Paradox — altering the past to alter the future — by using the frazzled physicist's notebook as a step-by-step guide to changing time. Looks like Doc Shephard — opting for a new wait-and-see approach to heroism during this tour of Island duty — has finally identified his moment to act. If Daniel's notebook really is some kind of Bible that holds the key to castaway salvation, then Faraday's legacy will be redeemed. He'll have been transformed from a sheep led to slaughter — by his own mother no less! — to a Christ-like good shepherd, sacrificing his life to bring his Lost herd home.

I like the idea of ''Daniel Faraday, Lost messiah.'' A man of science making a crazy leap of faith would make for a nifty reconciliation of the show's warring themes and an apt conclusion to this ''316'' season, which is now one week away from being history itself.

''LOST UNTANGLED''
For ABC's action-figure re-enactment of ''The Variable,'' press play. But also check out the new installment of Totally Lost at the end of this column for the Dan-and-Jeff take on the episode.

'Lost': Long Ago and Faraday
Doc Jensen on tonight's ''Follow the Leader,'' where Jack takes up the idea to alter the past as a way to alter the future. Plus: A couple of comics connections, tickling the ivories, protons vs. photons, and a season-ending survey for ''Lost'' fans
Buzz up!More

FARADAY IS DONE This time, the Doc pronounces, dead is dead
All About
Lost

By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''SHEPHERD OR SHEEP?
A preview of ''Follow the Leader''; a prospective eulogy for Daniel Faraday

He's dead. That's the word. No miracle resurrection like John Locke. No trips to the Temple for a restorative cure like Young Ben. Nope, this time, dead is dead. R.I.P. Daniel Faraday, survived by a pair of monstrous parents (presuming you believe Charles Widmore is indeed his pop) and bunches of unanswered questions. How did he know that Dr. Pierre Chang was Miles' father? Why was he so certain that his Mother Other would know how to get the castaways back to the present? What exactly was he doing for the Dharma Initiative back in Ann Arbor, Mich.? And what exactly did he mean back in the season premiere when he called Desmond ''uniquely and miraculously special''?

Last week, in my recap of ''The Variable,'' I noted that there seemed to be something calculated and intentional about his reckless chaos-making, and I speculated that Daniel may have blustered into the Others' tent city knowing exactly what was going to happen, and even wanting it to happen. I could be wrong — and I'll be fine if I am — but I think it would be cool if we learned there was more to Daniel's actions last week than meets the eye. According to the previews for tonight's episode, ''Follow the Leader,'' Jack will take up Project: Paradox — altering the past to alter the future — by using the frazzled physicist's notebook as a step-by-step guide to changing time. Looks like Doc Shephard — opting for a new wait-and-see approach to heroism during this tour of Island duty — has finally identified his moment to act. If Daniel's notebook really is some kind of Bible that holds the key to castaway salvation, then Faraday's legacy will be redeemed. He'll have been transformed from a sheep led to slaughter — by his own mother no less! — to a Christ-like good shepherd, sacrificing his life to bring his Lost herd home.

I like the idea of ''Daniel Faraday, Lost messiah.'' A man of science making a crazy leap of faith would make for a nifty reconciliation of the show's warring themes and an apt conclusion to this ''316'' season, which is now one week away from being history itself.

''LOST UNTANGLED''
For ABC's action-figure re-enactment of ''The Variable,'' press play. But also check out the new installment of Totally Lost at the end of this column for the Dan-and-Jeff take on the episode.

'Lost': Long Ago and Faraday
Doc Jensen on tonight's ''Follow the Leader,'' where Jack takes up the idea to alter the past as a way to alter the future. Plus: A couple of comics connections, tickling the ivories, protons vs. photons, and a season-ending survey for ''Lost'' fans
Buzz up!More

FARADAY IS DONE This time, the Doc pronounces, dead is dead
All About
Lost

By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''SHEPHERD OR SHEEP?
A preview of ''Follow the Leader''; a prospective eulogy for Daniel Faraday

He's dead. That's the word. No miracle resurrection like John Locke. No trips to the Temple for a restorative cure like Young Ben. Nope, this time, dead is dead. R.I.P. Daniel Faraday, survived by a pair of monstrous parents (presuming you believe Charles Widmore is indeed his pop) and bunches of unanswered questions. How did he know that Dr. Pierre Chang was Miles' father? Why was he so certain that his Mother Other would know how to get the castaways back to the present? What exactly was he doing for the Dharma Initiative back in Ann Arbor, Mich.? And what exactly did he mean back in the season premiere when he called Desmond ''uniquely and miraculously special''?

Last week, in my recap of ''The Variable,'' I noted that there seemed to be something calculated and intentional about his reckless chaos-making, and I speculated that Daniel may have blustered into the Others' tent city knowing exactly what was going to happen, and even wanting it to happen. I could be wrong — and I'll be fine if I am — but I think it would be cool if we learned there was more to Daniel's actions last week than meets the eye. According to the previews for tonight's episode, ''Follow the Leader,'' Jack will take up Project: Paradox — altering the past to alter the future — by using the frazzled physicist's notebook as a step-by-step guide to changing time. Looks like Doc Shephard — opting for a new wait-and-see approach to heroism during this tour of Island duty — has finally identified his moment to act. If Daniel's notebook really is some kind of Bible that holds the key to castaway salvation, then Faraday's legacy will be redeemed. He'll have been transformed from a sheep led to slaughter — by his own mother no less! — to a Christ-like good shepherd, sacrificing his life to bring his Lost herd home.

I like the idea of ''Daniel Faraday, Lost messiah.'' A man of science making a crazy leap of faith would make for a nifty reconciliation of the show's warring themes and an apt conclusion to this ''316'' season, which is now one week away from being history itself.

''LOST UNTANGLED''
For ABC's action-figure re-enactment of ''The Variable,'' press play. But also check out the new installment of Totally Lost at the end of this column for the Dan-and-Jeff take on the episode.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid22077170001?bclid=22163154001&bctid=22186728001

DOC JENSEN'S NO PRIZE WINNER
Last week, I wrote these words: ''Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds.'' The comic-book fanboys who read this column had no trouble identifying the reference to the best damn superhero comic book of the past decade, Planetary. Written by Warren Ellis and drawn by John Cassaday, it's about a trio of super-powered archeologists who dig up the strange secret history of the 20th century, a history that has been suppressed by a mysteriously sinister quartet known as the Four. Ellis and Cassaday used this premise to canvass every possible genre of fantastic fiction imaginable, from Japanese horror to Kubrickian sci-fi, from early-century pulp fiction to late-century Marvel Comics. I was obsessed with Planetary the same way I am currently obsessed with Lost. I loved scouring Cassaday's panels for ''Easter eggs,'' loved parsing all of Ellis' carefully written lines for code words that might illuminate the larger mystery. In fact, I've often wondered if there could be a link between Planetary and Lost...but I'm saving my reasons why for another day.

Anyway, kudos to Canadian reader Jason Fedorchuk for being the first reader to get an e-mail into my inbox with the correct answer. Part of his No Prize: He gets space to advocate his belief that there's another comic-book series out there with even more relevancy to Lost:

''Did you really just reference Planetary in your column? Wow. I know you like the comic books like I do; why have you not yet name-checked Grant Morrison's The Invisibles? Secret wars, weird powers, time-jumping mind projection, confusing Us-versus-Them dynamics, themes of identity and purification of self, mystery figures who show up spouting enigmas, and cool heroes who do uncool things. It's all there.''

Jason offers an interesting reading recommendation, though as a Lost touchstone, I'm not sold — not until the show finds a way to incorporate tantric sex, alien demons, and a ''Brazilian transgender shaman.'' FUN FACT! One of the many talented artists who helped bring The Invisibles to life was Doc Jensen's college roommate and good friend, Phil Jimenez, who is probably tickled by this shout-out but also quite concerned that his old friend is now referring to himself in the third person....

All right, enough geeky comic-book stuff. It's time to class up this nerdy joint with your theories!

RAINBOWS AND GOOD VIBRATIONS
The significance of Daniel Faraday, Piano Man

Jennifer Alexander from Ontario, Canada, sent me the following e-mail the other day:

''Your episode recaps are infamous for your attention to all the minutiae of each scene. However, it seems you neglected to note the choice of music Daniel was playing on his piano, first as a child and then later as an adult: 'I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.' This song selection certainly reflects Daniel's life...and its theme — the failure to achieve happiness by chasing after goals that are unattainable — could come to represent the castaways' plans to alter the future.''

The lyrics to the song — from the 1918 Broadway musical Oh, Look! — go like this:

At the end of the rainbow there's happiness
And to find it often I've tried,
But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase,
And my dreams have all been denied.
Why have I always been a failure?
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world's to blame,
I wonder if it could be me.
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by,
My schemes are just like all my dreams,
Ending in the sky.
Some fellows look and find the sunshine,
I always look and find the rain.
Some fellows make a winning sometime,
But I never even make a gain, believe me,
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.

Irene forges an intriguing connection, though I really can't tell you if she's correct: Pre-'60s music ain't my area of expertise. In fact, according to other Lost recappers, Faraday actually may have been playing another tune altogether: Chopin's ''Scherzo No. 2, Op. 31.'' But I could see how there could be confusion; as it happens, the melody of ''I'm Always Chasing Rainbows'' was adapted from another Chopin tune, ''Fantasia-Impromptu.'' FUN FACT! Like Faraday, Chopin was a child prodigy, had a gift for mimetic recall (though Faraday would ultimately lose this ability due to his time-travel experiments), and kept a notebook full of secrets. CREEPY FUN FACT ABOUT CHOPIN! Apparently, it was his wish that his heart be removed after he died and preserved in alcohol. Something to do with his fear of being buried alive, according to Wikipedia. I hear that you can currently find Chopin's marinated heart in one of the jars in Jacob's cabin...

Chopin or no Chopin, the revelation that Faraday can tickle the ivories is also interesting for this reason: He's not the only one. Lost has also shown us that Charlie, Jack, and Ben can play the piano. Why might this be significant? Because as Lost blogger JOpinionated reminds us over at docarzt.com, there's a music-based mystery in the Lost matrix that has never been resolved. Recall, if you will, when Charlie swam down to the Looking Glass at the end of season 3 to turn off the jamming device preventing the castaways from communicating with the outside world. He learned from Bonnie — one of the lovely Other ladies that Ben had stationed down there — that the code to shut off the jamming device was harmonic, set to the tune of the Beach Boys' ''Good Vibrations.'' Right before Bonnie died, she said that the code ''was programmed by a musician.'' At the time, these cryptic words inspired a great deal of wild theorizing. Many of us wondered if it wasn't an accident that the Dharma programmer created a code that rock star Charlie would be uniquely qualified to crack. What if the musician behind the Beach Boys puzzle knew Charlie's destiny?

But in light of what season 5 has shown us, should we be wondering if this mystery musician was one of the castaways? It's JOpinionated's theory that Faraday himself created the code, leveraging his knowledge of future events as well as his all-access Dharma pass as a member of the Initiative's Black Swan team. It's a nifty theory — it very much echoes my long-held assertion that much of Dharma was created or at least revised with the castaways in mind — and I suggest you click over to docarzt.com to read it in its entirety.

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: GEEK SEMANTICS EDITION!
PLUS: An important survey for Lost fans!

Last week, I compared the act of changing time to Luke Skywalker firing two photon torpedoes to blow up the Death Star. Oops:

''As much as I hate this kind of geeky nitpicking, I had to take the opportunity to correct your crossing of Star Wars/Star Trek lore. I'm sure I'm not the first fanboy to point this out, but the Death Star was blown up by two carefully placed proton torpedoes, while the photon variety would be found in the Starship Enterprise's arsenal. (Though, I do love the mental image of the Death Star being destroyed by the Enterprise.) Since they're only one letter different, we'll call it a late-night typo. (Yes, I should really get a life.)'' —Chris Bisgard

Chris, thank you for being the vigilant nerd that you are and setting me straight. And your nitpicking brings me to two burning questions I have for you guys today:

Last week in my recap of ''The Variable,'' I discussed the continuity fluctuations that many fans have seized upon this season, such as Young Ben's roaming bullet hole. I suggested that these ''glitches,'' noticeable only to the very few of us who insanely scrutinize every single detail of the show, are either early warning signs of the imminent collapse of Lost history due to actions in the past, or...simple continuity errors that mean nothing at all to the story. I clicked through a number of scenarios without really taking a stand on the issue, so let me do so now: While I think it would be neat if these apparent mistakes were intentionally made to create a narrative that metaphorically resembles the imperiled continuity of Lost history, I would also be absolutely fine with learning these things mean nothing. The roaming bullet hole could be just an error; the altered or telescoped lines upon second reference mere creative license for the sake of narrative expediency. No big whoop, in my book. So my first burning question is this: Do you mind if Lost makes mistakes? Would your enjoyment of season 5 really be diminished if these glitches prove to be meaningless? Or do you think you'll pull a Faraday and pretty quickly forget they ever even happened?

My second burning question is more important to me. As we find ourselves almost at the close of season 5, which mysteries do you feel Lost must absolutely resolve during its sixth and final season? Don't tell me ''all of them,'' because (a), that's unrealistic; and (b), ''all of them'' is a matter of opinion: One fan's unresolved mystery can be another fan's ''Who cares?'' What I want is what I would call your ''non-negotiables'' — the mysteries that Lost NEEDS to resolve. And to make you think even more carefully about this question, I want you to submit only your top three non-negotiables. I recognize that all of you probably have a lot more than three — I know I do — but for the purposes of this exercise, I want you to be choosy and discerning. In other words: Be nitpicky about your own nitpickiness. Send your submissions to JeffJensenEW@aol.com. (And yes, I'm clearing out my mailbox to handle the influx.) The results of this extremely informal and unscientific survey will be shared in my final Doc Jensen column of the season. So take some time, think this through, and hit me back with an e-mail — but first, please enjoy our newest installment of Totally Lost.

Be seeing you — tomorrow, at the recap!

Doc Jensen

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid22084043001?bclid=22163156001&bctid=22195565001

EW: Doc Jensen: 'Lost' Recap: A Twist of Fate

Faraday's return has extreme consequences for everyone, especially him

MAD SCIENTIST Faraday's brilliant but sometimes faulty mind latched on to a new theory for salvation that might not work out so well for him

By Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''We need to talk about Daniel Faraday getting gunned down by his mom. (He's dead, I think — but not for long.) We need to talk about the frazzled physicist's plan to reboot history by nuking the Island with our long-lost leaky H-bomb friend, Jughead. (Might I suggest he start looking for it somewhere in the shadow of the statue?) And yes, we need to talk about the revelation that Charles Widmore is Danny-boy's father. (Brits for parents? So how come Faraday speaks Americanese?) But first, I want to talk about the Wired magazine cameo. We saw it on Faraday's couch, just as Widmore took a seat and offered his noodle-cooked son passage to Brain Healing Island aboard his Black Freighter of Keamy Death. It was the August 2003 issue of Wired — ''The Super-Powers Issue'' — devoted to the plausible science behind far-fetched stuff like invisibility, X-ray vision, and yes, time travel. The cover featured an archetypal superhero blasting white light out of his Cyclops-visored eyes and breaking a link of chain with his Man of Steel bare hands. The headline: ''The Impossible Gets Real!''

Now, it's probably not a coincidence that an old issue of Wired made an appearance in an episode of Lost airing the same month that the current issue of Wired features one JJ Abrams as its guest editor. But why did Lost choose this particular back issue for its latest rewind, pause, and squint Easter-egg clue? Well, there's the time travel article, which spotlights the two theories favored by most Lostologists, Throne Plates and Kerr Rings. There's also this cover-touted article, ''The End of Cancer As We Know It,'' which can be found on...Page 108. Cancer, of course, has haunted Lost since season 1; and 108 is the sum total of all Lost's numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) and integral to the mystery of the Hatch. (''Every 108 minutes, a button must be pushed...'') But for me, it's all about ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' Two weeks ago, I wondered if the ominous ebony uniforms of Dharma's Black Swan team could be a nod to a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Now, with Wired, we have two consecutive episodes that feature a coy clue foreshadowing the imminent arrival of an extremely unlikely, yet not-at-all implausible, game-changing event.

This is all to say, I totally believe in Faraday's new theory that the time-traveling castaways can alter the past — that whatever happened can...well, un-happen. And I believe before the end of the season, someone will. But not Faraday; and certainly not by anyone following through on his crazy Let's turn the Swan site into a radioactive bird bath! scheme. (Someone's been watching a little too much Beneath The Planet of The Apes.) (Besides me, that is.) No, it's going to be another one of Faraday's designated super-special variables that will heroically break the chain of causality that has turned the lives of the castaways into a never-ending Twilight Zone episode. But which one? And how will they do it? Welcome to Lost's version of a ''Who shot JR?'' season finale, writ geeky and cosmic: ''Who changed time?''

THE VARIABLE:
MOTHER, JUGHEAD, AND SPEED IT UP!

The 100th episode of Lost — the fifth's season antepenultimate installment (that's a fancy way of saying ''third to last'') — was all about momma issues, mad scientist schemes, and the official start of a season-ending, ticking-clock plot in which our heroes must race against time to save themselves from electromagnetic calamity. (Unless Faraday wasn't being truthful about that — and I think it's possible he wasn't.) The episode had been billed as a dark corollary to ''The Constant,'' the season 4 classic in which Desmond went back in time to set up a future phone date with Penelope. But allow me to suggest a connection to another Lost episode.

For weeks, I've been insisting that season 5 parallels season 2, and deliberately so: the series is doubling back on itself, creating an ouroboros-shaped saga (a snake that chases and eats its own tail; see: Ms. Hawking's brooch, Season 3) whereby the castaways are helping to forge the very history that forged them. In the final episodes of season 2, MIA Michael returned to the castaway fold and manipulated them into actions that had long-tail ramifications. Here, at the close of season 5, it appears to me that Prodigal Dan has come back to do something very similar. Specifically to ''The Variable,'' we have a title that is thematically identical to season 2's antepenultimate outing, known as ''?''. Both episodes were about the same thing: a philosophical role reversal. In ''?'', John Locke changed his mind about the Hatch and decided (erroneously) that the Button was a mind-game that had no meaning. The fateful mistake would have massive consequences, none bigger than turning Desmond Hume into a time traveler and doomsday Cassandra. In ''The Variable,'' Faraday returned with a new perspective on the mutability of the time-space continuum and a Big Plan to put that thinking into action. If his gambit works, the consequences could be massive, especially for Desmond, whose entire Island narrative was defined by being stuck in the very structure that Faraday now wants to erase from existence. No one would be more affected by paradox than Faraday's half-sister's husband. ''The Variable'' was loaded with lines filled with double-meanings, like this one by Desmond: ''I promised you, Penny...I promised you I'd never leave you again.'' Famous last words, friend-o. Be very afraid, all you DesPen shippers: I fear their happily-ever-after life is about to unravel in the continuity reboot to come. Put another way: See you in another life, bruthuh.

DANIEL: But I can make time.
ELOISE: If only you could.

Why did she do it? Why did Eloise Hawking put her son on a road to predestined ruin — by her own hand, no less? I'm haunted by the question. In Faraday's first flashback scene (the year wasn't specified), we saw Mama Other interrupt Adolescent Dan's piano practice and break the news to her budding Glenn Gould that Carnegie Hall wasn't in the cards for him. She was distraught; she knew what she was about to set into motion. But she composed herself to carefully made her pitch, like Obi-Wan gingerly selling young Luke Skywalker on the whole Jedi Knight thing. Eloise said that Daniel had a destiny, and it was her job to help him pursue it, to put him and keep him on ''his path.'' She told him he had a proverbial quantum computer for a brain resting within his crystal alien skull, and that he had to learn to harness its magnificent energies to lead his people back to their planet. Okay, what she actually said was that he had ''a special gift...your mind,'' but I clearly got the vibe that his metronome-tracking mental superiority was akin to a Miles-like super-power. So, was Dan also an Island baby, too? FUN FACT! In the aforementioned Wired issue, one of eight abilities profiled in an article on plausible super-powers is total recall — rather ironic in light of Faraday's memory issues in the episode. Also featured: teleportation (see: Jack and co. getting beamed off the plane), regeneration (see: John Locke's legs; the Island's quick-healing powers), weather manipulation (see: meteorology was one of Dharma's fields of study); force fields (see: the sonic fence); underwater breathing (see: Charlie swimming toward the Looking-Glass); super-strength (see: Desmond, battling back a worse-than-it-appeared gunshot wound to beat the bloody snot out of Ben). As for the eighth power, x-ray vision: Smokey?

Daniel's youth was a big pile of no-fun. Eloise pushed him hard — like Gypsy-mom hard, like Carrie-mom hard, like Texas Cheerleader Mom hard — to become a grant-scoring, youngest-Oxford-doc-ever, time travel machine-inventing genius, even at the expense of a conventional mother-child relationship. Learn your Maxwell equations, or no more hugs! And I don't care if you think they look like Kerr rings, get your Slurpee cup off my hardbound limited edition 'A Brief History of Time!' That's no way to treat your Uncle Stevie's manuscript! Now: rub my corns, please. Behold the incarnation of conditional parental love — of maternal nurturing that was very much a variable, not a constant, in Dan's life. And she was rude to his girlfriends, too! Wouldn't even let poor soon-to-be-brain-scrambled Theresa come to graduation lunch! Bitch.

We could think the worst of Ms. Hawking. With time loop theory, we could paint her as a real monster. In this scenario, she would be someone so spooked by death that she'd be willing to shoot and maybe even kill her son over and over and over and over again, forever and ever, amen, just to cheat the grim reaper. But I'm going to bet this week's offering money that such a deliciously dark possibility is, alas, not the case. My interpretation of Eloise's motivations — most suggested by the scene in which she tenderly behooved brain-damaged Adult Dan to take the freighter gig — was that she wanted Dan to go to the Island to get healed and use his ''gift'' to find some way to buck the odds of physics and change time, especially the whole I shot my son thing. (Remember how in ''Dead Is Dead'' Smokey judged Ben for his daughter's death? Maybe that's why Eloise fled the Island — to escape the Monster's judgment.)

I invoked time loop theory in the previous paragraph, but ''The Variable'' left me feeling that maybe time loops aren't valid to Lost, after all. Notice I said maybe; I'm not ready to throw it out yet. I'm just saying I'm skeptical. Anyway, on Lost, there are other ways to know the future. The example of Desmond established that it's possible in this world to have the gift/curse of precognition — the ability to see into the future. The season 3 episode ''Flashes Before Your Eyes'' established that Eloise has long possessed knowledge of future events, although last night, we learned that she is no longer the seer that she used to be. ''For the first time in a long time I don't know what's going to happen next,'' she told Penelope. FUN FACT! The Dead Zone, the 1979 novel by Lost inspiration Stephen King, is set against the backdrop of 1970s events, about a guy who can see into the future by touching stuff.

Among the many lingering questions I have about the provocative though maddeningly incomplete joint Faraday-Hawking flashbacks, there is this: At one point did Shotgun Ellie, Queen of the Others, realize that the Charles Manson-looking interloper that wandered into her camp recklessly brandishing a gun was in fact her son all grown up? The most likely possibility is that next week, Jack and Kate will emerge from their hiding place and start yelling, ''You stupid dingbat! You just shot your kid!'' They'll probably prove it by making her read his notebook. She'll notice the inscription written in her handwriting and maybe even read a tell-tale entry (November, 1994: Mom made me break up with another girlfriend today. Just for that, I'm going to name my lab rat after her and scramble its brain with my time travel ray. Take that, ELOISE HAWKING WHO IS MY MOTHER!) and she'll suddenly realize: ''Oops. Blimey!''

Still, I find myself going back to that first flashback scene and mulling the possibility that moments before Eloise entered the piano parlor in tears, something happened. And I wonder if that something could have been discovering, for the first time, the true identity of the man she shot in the jungle. How? Maybe a phone call from all-knowing Widmore. Maybe an extended flash of Dan's bendy-shaped future. Or maybe (yes!) a Back to the Future 2 scenario: a letter from time traveling Faraday himself, written during his Ann Arbor but not delivered, per his instructions, until this flashback's point in time, several years later. Dear Mom: Yep, that was me you shot in 1977 — the kid currently playing the piano in the other room, all grown up. But listen: I don't hate you. In fact, it's actually now vitally important that you keep me on my path. I think I've found a way to beat this destiny thing, but to do so, you gotta send me to the Island. And you have to make sure you do one thing, because in stories like this, it always boiled down to that — that one, important thing. And it's this: I need you to give me a notebook after I graduate from Oxford. Make sure you tell me you always loved me in the inscription, because that's thematically important, especially after last week's episode, which dealt with the cost of broken parental bonds and love that goes unexpressed. I don't totally understand it myself, but I'm telling you: it's key. Anyway: gotta catch the sub. See you in another life, mum! XOXO—DF

Of course, I'm also fond of the idea that Eloise got her devastating 411 via a sudden superluminal download of revised personal history due to changes to the past wrought by the time-traveling castaways made possible by their interconnected quantum entanglement...oh, another time.

A few additional thoughts about Widmore and Faraday...
The Widmore/Faraday sequence extended Daniel's mysterious flashback beat from the season 4 episode ''Confirmed Dead'' and expanded on what he learned about him earlier this year in ''Jughead.'' Not only did he use research assistant/gal pal Theresa in his consciousness transfer time travel experiments, but as many of you predicted, Faraday used himself, as well, rendering him all mumbles and pained expressions. His brain had become a sieve (cue the Thomas Dolby song, if you will); apparently, his memory bank, like Jughead, had become all leaky and incapable of retaining much memory. He was fired from Oxford, fled to the States, lived with a woman who took care of him, relationship unknown. Many of you believe that the reason he was experiencing such déjà vu while watching news coverage of the fake Oceanic 815's discovery was because he had mentally visited this moment during one of his self-administered time ray zaps. I am inclined to agree with you.

Widmore visited. Took responsibility for the fake Oceanic 815 thing. (So much for my theory last week that Ben was actually to culprit.) Offered him the Freighter gig. Promised him healing. And he so heavily foreshadowed the revelation about being Dan's dad, that when we got confirmation in the later Widmore/Hawking scene (''He's my son, too''/SLAP!), it felt like something of a non-shocker. Speaking of the SLAP, why did you think Eloise slapped him? My wife is convinced that Widmore isn't Daniel's biological father — which may make sense if his claim to Dan that he had never met him is true — and that the real DNA daddy is... Richard Alpert.

About Desmond and Penelope...
The Desmond stuff was curious. I didn't realize that gunshot wound was so bad — especially after Des recovered quickly enough to beat the tar out of Ben and dump him in the marina. (What? The carton of milk wasn't bulletproof?) I guess he got one of those mama-goes-Hulk-to-save-her-kids-from-an-overturned-car surges of strength things. Regardless, Desmond was rushed to the hospital, attendants barking panicky phrases like ''He's coding!'' But he survived, and left us to wonder if he was the latest in a string of ex-Islanders who can't die back in the real world because their fates remain entangled with the Island.

But back to the (allegedly) buggy continuity. For many weeks now, many of you have been asking me to comment about the season's penchant for returning to previous scenes, particularly the fateful marina summit of the Oceanic 6, but shown from different perspectives and featuring slightly altered details. For example, in one episode, Sayid told Ben and Jack, ''I don't want any part of this. And if I see you, or him again, it will be extremely unpleasant for all of us.'' But in the Sayid-centric ''He's Our You,'' we saw the scene again, but this time Sayid spoke solely to Ben: ''And if I see you again, it'll be extremely unpleasant for us both.'' Another example: Young Ben's roaming bullet hole. When Sayid shot him in ''He's Our You,'' the hole was on the one side of his chest. But in the next episode, ''Whatever Happened, Happened,'' it was on the other. And so we must decide: is Lost getting sloppy with the continuity, or do these discrepancies mean something? There has been speculation that these blips are evidence of a changing timeline. There has also been speculation that these blips are evidence of the observer effect at work in Lost, the quantum physics idea that individual perception shapes reality. And there has also been speculation that these blips — or more specifically, the repeated practice of calling back to shared moments — have something to do with ''frame dragging,'' a phenomenon associated with black holes and other reality-distorting anomalies. Me? I'm willing to shrug these things off as meaningless anachronisms, if you will. Except... FUN FACT! The word ''anachronism,'' according to wikipedia, means ''an error in chronology.'' In 1888, HG Wells wrote a short story called The Chronic Argonauts — a precursor to his more famous book, The Time Machine — about two time travelers who take shelter in an a dilapidated shack abandoned by its deceased owners. One of these quantum leapers is described as ''the Anachronic Man,'' a genius desperate to find an era to call home. One word: Jacob?

Any-hoo...

There was that damn funny moment when Ms. Hawking actually laid the blame for Desmond's shooting at Faraday's feet. ''Your son is Benjamin Linus?'' ''Oh, good lord, no,'' says Hawking, sounding revolted by the prospect that such a warty toad could have ever squirted out of her womb. Hawking's logic is interesting. In her view, Faraday's decision to send a message to 2007 Desmond via Hatch-era Desmond set in motion a chain of events that led Ben to their boat, gun blazing. Hawking seemed to evidence regret for her son's actions. Combined with her subsequent statement to Penelope that she had no idea what's was going to happen anymore, it made me think: Faraday — or someone — has successfully changed the past, but it may not have exactly produced the new present that Hawking had wanted.

BLACK SWANS AND IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS: FARADAY'S LEAP OF FAITH

''But still try, for who knows what it is possible.''

The above quote wasn't part of the script, but it was there, in the subtext of ''The Variable,'' nurturing Daniel Faraday's mad, maybe-futile, fate-defying Island quest to create history-nullifying paradox, and maybe more importantly, rouse the castaways out of their complacency and fatalism and incite them to re-take control over their lives, despite the odds. The quote — so fitting for this ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' episode of Lost — comes from Faraday's namesake, the 19th century egghead Michael Faraday, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetic science. It speaks to one of themes of the episode: How then do we live when destiny has us by the nuts?

Faraday's stated mission in returning to the Island after a couple years ''doing research'' at Dharma HQ in Ann Arbor (man, I hope we still get that backstory, dead Dan or no dead Dan) was to find Jughead and use the bomb to ''negate'' the wellspring of electromagnetic energy underneath the Swan construction site, which Faraday claimed was only hours away from exploding into catastrophe due to Dharma's drilling. Jack and Kate looked ready to roll their eyes at Faraday — but it seemed to me that his description of the Hatch, and especially the bit of business about cement being slathered over the EM spill à la Chernobyl, swayed them. Indeed, Jack had heard Sayid make the same exact Chernobyl comparison about the Swan when they went exploring its basement in season 2.

Faraday's change of mind about changing time was rooted in the almost religious certainty that his fellow time travelers' innate free will was more powerful than mathematics and physics. They were free radicals; they were variables; they were human monkey wrenches in the mechanics of reality. I found Faraday's sermon on the mount to be really corny — and really depressing if it wasn't true. Either way, I did find it hard to believe that this bright young man, no matter how troubled, couldn't have come up with that piece of common sense, however dubious, sooner. Regardless: I'm rolling with it, because I believe in the theme it represents: we must live proactively, ''but still try, for who knows what it possible.''

Faraday believed that if he could essentially eliminate the need for the Hatch, Oceanic 815 wouldn't crash, the freighter wouldn't come to the Island, nobody would go quantum leaping because of erroneously turned donkey wheels — known history would be ''erased,'' to use a Kate term, and a new history would be take its place. ''This entire chain of events, it's going to start happening this afternoon,'' he explained. ''But we can change it.'' Faraday's logic would seem to be sound. Elementary cause and effect, right? Push this domino, the rest fall. Pull that thread, the whole fabric unravels. Fire these two photon torpedoes into this tiny shaft, the Death Star explodes. Right? Well, not quite, says quantum physics and Black Swan probability theory. Both schools of thought would say, quite basically, that the odds of successfully manufacturing a single, game-changing event of this magnitude are beyond microscopically small. Not impossible — just unlikely.

Which makes me wonder if Faraday came to the Island with a back-up plan. And in fact, I think most of his Island adventure was about putting that back-up plan in motion. Call it Operation: Create Total Chaos. From the second he stepped off that sub, Faraday was kinetic energy incarnate, hellbent on colliding with his old friends and setting them in motion like a wild photon-firing electron or hyperactive cue ball. He threw cold water on Jack Shephard's ''man of faith'' conversion by crapping on his mother's destiny talk. (''''And how did she convince you? Did she tell you it was your destiny? Well, I got some bad news for you, Jack. You don't belong here at all!'' For me, the line seemed less like it was about Faraday debunking his mother but more about blowing Jack out of his watch-and-wait inertia.) He staked out the Orchid, waited for Dr. Chang to arrive (''Right on time,'' he said), then filled his ears with hysteria about evacuating the Island because of impending disaster and spilled the beans about Miles Straume actually being his son. (This sequence, an expanded version of the season's opening scene, turned ''The Variable'' into an elaborate variant edition of the season premiere itself.) He got the whole castaway crew moving: Sawyer, Juliet, Hurley and Miles to the beach; Jack and Kate with him to the Others' Tent City. And he all but baited Radzinsky and the Black Swan team into a firefight by flashing a gun and talking provocative. If Faraday is correct, and the time travelers are loose canon variables capable of changing history, then I think that we saw Faraday trying to light the fuse on each of them in hopes that one of them will somehow, someway fire that one shot, whatever it is, that will change everything. Faraday's approach to heroism is a bit like my approach to Lost theorizing: throw a lot of stuff at the wall, hope something sticks.

Faraday's actions seemed to be guided by the contents of his notebook, as if it held a "This Day In Dharma History!" schedule of events. 10 AM: Dr. Chang will arrive at the Orchid. 10:10 AM Dr. Chang will leave the Orchid. 12:30 Mom will be hanging with the Hostiles; jungle location TBD. 4:00 PM: ''The Incident.'' Run/swim like hell. 9:00 PM: Smores. Faraday clearly returned to the Island with more information about it than when he left — including the 411 on his mother's membership in the Hostiles. Which made me even more curious about what exactly he was doing over there in Ann Arbor with Dharma's head honchos. Last summer at Comic-Con, the Lost producers showed attendees a teaser video of the season that strongly suggested that Dharma had the means to send messages to people in the future, à la the movie Frequency. One wonders if Faraday was working the quantum radio and getting info from someone in the present....

Whether it was his primary plan or secondary plan or the only plan he had, Faraday's gambit reached a temporary or permanent stall in The Others' tent city. I watched the episode with about a dozen people, and more than half of us felt there was something a little contrived about the way Faraday bumbled into the Hostiles' territory. Recklessly brandishing and then discharging his gun, near-raving as he demanded to see Ellie, and then forcing a crisis by petulantly giving Alpert to the count of three to give him instant satisfaction — I mean, Faraday was practically asking to get shot. What if he was? Was he genuinely gripped by sickening shock at the awareness that his mother had set him up to be shot (''You knew...you always knew this was going to happen...and you sent me here anyway...'') or was he just playing out the part? I don't think he had any fear of being killed. On the contrary, even though he told Jack that they could die in the past, it stands to reason that depending on the scope and reach of the negating paradox, a rebooted timeline would effectively bring select dead folks back to life. Perhaps Faraday's plan to save the castaways and change history actually required that he follow through on getting shot — even killed. Because in Faraday's plan, it's what happens next that's most crucial.

What might that ''something next'' be? I'm not altogether convinced that the history-negating paradox will be wrought by Faraday. And I'm also pretty sure such change won't be facilitated by the detonation of Jughead or the destruction of the Hatch. This feels like classic Lost misdirection to me — the magician's slight of hand; the grifter's long con — designed to keep our eyes trained on the big brassy possibility, setting us up for the smaller, more subtle, more humane and emotional play that will surprise and move us. Today, my money's on Miles, getting the gumption to move past his fear and father issues and coming clean with Dr. Chang. Yep, Freaky Faraday was right. I am your kid. And there's something more you need to know. Something about our future. About what's going to happen here... And from there, consequences will flow.

And one of them, I'm betting, will be a world where Daniel Faraday was never shot — and maybe killed — by his own mother...

Of course, the fallacy in Faraday's time-changing gambit is his assumption that the new history he doesn't know will be better than the crap history that he hates. I think he's also envisioning a sweeping, epic reboot. I bet it won't work like that. I bet some characters get tweaked, a couple scenarios get dramatically revised, but otherwise everything stays the same. The differences will be different enough to feed a whole new season of story — but too many differences might not be a good idea. My prediction for the season finale, now two weeks away, is this. Paradox will be produced; we'll get 10 seconds of in-jokey, Sopranos-esque black; and then we'll suddenly pop up on Jack's eyeball blinking awake. We will see him push through the bushes and branches and get to the beach, where he'll find his castaway friends scattered on the beach, regaining consciousness. We won't know when we are, or what exactly has happened, and neither will they. But as they get their bearings, they will realize that there's a huge freakin' statue looming above them, and they're lying in the shadow of it. And as they get to their feet and try to wrap their minds around what they're seeing, they will hear a voice from behind them.

''Guys... where are we?''

And they'll turn and look...

And it will be Charlie Pace.

QUICK HITS:

MORE ON DAN'S PLAN: Pressed by Miles to explain his disclosures to Dr. Chang, Dan replied, ''Just making sure your father does what he's supposed to do. You'll see.'' Dan's plan seemed to involve making sure some people do what they've always done, and making sure the Variables do something radically different. Or was Dan manipulating Chang with some reverse psychology? Is the thing that Dan wants Chang to do not the thing he told him to do? You tracking with me?

SAWYER CALLING KATE ''FRECKLES.''/JULIET'S REACTION. One word: Oops.

DAN'S CHAT WITH CHARLOTTE: Did you get the sense there was more to that conversation at the end than we were allowed to hear?

''FONZIE TIMES'': Great laugh.

ELOISE: ''CASUALITIES IN A CONFLICT THAT'S BIGGER THAN ALL OF US.''/WIDMORE: ''MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PENELOPE IS ONE OF THE THINGS I HAD TO SACRIFICE LONG AGO.'' Your theories, please, on what these lines mean. JeffJensenEW@aol.com
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20275722,00.html

EW Doc Jensen: 'Lost' recap: Smokey on the Daughter

Ben gets judged by the monster for letting Alex die, and the roots of the dead-mama's boy's feud with Charles Widmore are revealed

MOMMY ISSUES: Ben may be a bastard, but he’s a bastard with a soft spot for mothers

By Jeff Jensen
If there's a theory to be had that Lost is the sci-fi version of Survivor, we now know where tribal council takes place: In the subterranean court of The Island's pitiless judge, Smokey, an ancient chamber adorned with hieroglyphics and images of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis, an underworld deity who serves as a shepherd to lost souls and the adjudicator of a truthful heart. In ''Dead Is Dead,'' certain to be hailed as one of the season’s best episodes (marred only by some really bad hair pieces), Benjamin Linus crawled into the crack underneath The Temple's outer wall and found himself standing before The Monster's bench. The charge against him: Being a really crappy father. Steaming out of tiny holes in a perforated stone slate and accompanied by its trademark clicking, Smokey gathered itself into a black thunderclap crackling with psychic energy, then swallowed Ben whole.

A veritable ''Previously... on Lost'' recap of his tragic history with adopted daughter Alex flickered in the haze, from the moment he refused Charles Widmore's order to kill her when she was an infant to the day he allowed Keamy the Mercenary to blow her brain out across the Dharmaville green. I thought he was cruisin' for a Mr. Eko bruisin'... but then The Monster dissipated and curled back into the bowels of The Island. Phew. Linus was seemingly acquitted, but then Undead Alex showed up, looking pretty as a CW starlet — call her a Golem Girl. Pinning Ben against a pillar, Little Miss Death Becomes Her got even-steven with her faux pa for failing to prevent her murder by issuing the following, humiliating Island edict: Humble yourself before your new lord, John Locke. ''I know you’re already planning to kill him again,'' Alex seethed. ''You will listen to every word he says and you will follow his every order.''

Moments later, after Golem Girl had vanished, Ben found himself looking up into the gaze of the born again Island golden boy who now controls his destiny. ''What happened?'' Locke asked. ''It let me live,'' Ben replied queasily, looking like he'd just been slapped with a death sentence. Now you know what control freaks look like when they're made to go cold turkey.

Of course, we should be careful about drawing conclusions about Ben's guilt: The Island's judicial system seems to me as muddy as the dirty water that filled that... well, what the hell was that thing at the end of the rocky corridor on the other side of Ben's glyph door? It was a basin with a stopper, but when Ben reached down to unplug it so he could yell down the drain, it suddenly became communication device. Part bathtub, part telephone, I guess you could say it was... a teletubby? And who was on the other end? Jacob? Richard Alpert? The clandestine oomp-loompas who pull the levers and crank the wenches in The Island's engine room?

How many half-truths, obfuscations, and outright lies did Linus lay on us this episode? Part of the brilliance of Michael Emerson's performance is that it's hard to really know, and it forces you take a stand and make an interpretation that just might be totally incorrect. Here is mine: ''Dead is Dead'' was the story of how one of Ben's most ambitious fibs backfired big-time on him. His downfall began the moment he awoke in the Hydra Station and found Locke sitting by his cot sporting yet another one of his classic Season 5 grins. Hiya. Remember me? The guy you strangled to death? Yeah, that didn't really work... Ben told Locke that he knew his Island magic would bring him back. The surprise etched all over his face certainly suggested otherwise, but silver-tongued Ben explained it away by evoking his Doubting Thomas Sunday school lesson from ''316:'' ''Because it's one thing to believe it,'' he said, ''but it's another thing to see it.'' Then Ben told Locke that he had broken the rules by returning to The Island and claimed that he had a desire to be judged by Smokey. (''We don't even have a word for it,'' Ben clarified, ''but I believe you call it 'The Monster.''')

At the risk of impugning Ben's honesty... oh, wait, that's impossible. Anyway, my theory is that Ben really was totally shocked to see Locke alive again (Alex's line ''I know you're already planning to kill him again'' would seem to confirm that Ben wanted Locke dead dead, not temp dead), and I think he was trying to buy himself some time with Locke by dropping an idea that he knew would capture Locke's imagination: The prospect of The Island giving Ben cosmic comeuppance. After all, it wasn't like Locke was going to take vengeance. We know he ain't a killer. See: Season 3, when Locke couldn't knife his father to prove himself worthy of leading The Others. This is all to say that I think Ben had no intention of submitting himself to Smokey. I think what he wanted was to get back to The Island and hook back up with The Others. The Monster was just supposed to be... well, a smoke screen. But the great twist of ''Dead Was Dead'' was how circumstances, John Locke, and probably The Island itself conspired to make Ben's lie come true.

For weeks now, we've been debating: Has Ben always had the memory of Sayid shooting him as a child, even when Sayid was torturing Adult Ben in Season 2? I have been insisting that the answer is Yes. Last week, however, Richard Alpert seemed to suggest that some kind of amnesia would result from getting healed and becoming an Other. ''Dead Is Dead'' seemed to knowingly poke at this confusion. A couple times, when Ben was asked to recall his early years, he conveniently declined to answer. Then there was contradictory info. What to make of Ben's baffled reaction to the Dharma class picture photo showing Jack, Kate and Hurley? What to make of Ben recalling how he had been brought to The Temple as a child to be healed? And so the debate continues to rage. (FYI: We learned from Ben that The Temple is actually a separate structure, and that the ancient-looking, ivy-choked facade that we thought was part of The Temple was actually a wall built to keep The Temple proper hidden from ''outsiders'' like Locke and Sun. Interesting. Telling of... something. Like, maybe The Temple isn't some crumbling ziggurat, but rather some very modern edifice? Again, I ask, Just how legit are all these ruins? How much of them are just show pieces designed to fool newcomers as to the age and nature of The Island?)

JOHN LOCKE IS NOW:
A. A SUPER STUD
B. A SUPER-VLLAIN
C. EVERY BIT THE SUPER-SUCKER HE’S ALWAYS BEEN.

Born Again John Locke cut a powerful figure in ''Dead Is Dead.'' He was strong and strapping, brimming with confidence and beaming with vision. He knew new stuff, like where Ben had to go to get judged. (But he confessed he didn't know exactly how he knew that. Curious.) And he claimed to know even more, like when Sun asked him how they were going to reunite with Jin and the seventies-stuck castaways and he said, cryptically but sure, ''I have some ideas.'' By the way, I don't really think Locke really has any ideas. Yet. I think he has great faith that he will have a plan — or more specifically, that The Island will reveal the plan to him at the appropriate time. Locke is the Man of Faith that Dharma Jack wishes he could be: Living in the moment, lacking any bit of desperation, letting things play out, listening carefully for The Island's directing voice. At least, for now.

But for one episode at least, Locke got to be the Ben-esque omniscient mastermind, and he relished being in the driver's seat. ''You don't like this, do you?'' Locke said. ''Having to ask the questions you don’t know answers to. Now you know what it was like to be me.'' Locke definitely enjoyed making Ben squirm, no more so during their tete-a-tete in the uber-Other's old Hydra Station office. Taking a seat and propping his feet up, Locke said, ''I was hoping to talk about the elephant in the room,'' referring to how Ben had murdered him. In explaining his motives, Ben said exactly what many of us suspected: He had to save John from suicide to get crucial intelligence out of him — then kill him to motivate the Oceanic 6 to return to The Island. Ben's words have the ring of truth — they almost always do — but I still suspect part of his rationale was to stop Locke from meeting Eloise Hawking and learning what she may have to tell him. Strangely enough, Locke seemed to be — or pretended to be — disinterested in Ben's rationale. But his bitter scowl spoke volumes. Locke was all for Ben getting judged by Smokey. I think he wanted to see Smokey get all Mr. Eko on his ass. ''If everything you’ve done has been in the best interest of The Island,'' Locke quipped, ''then I'm sure the monster will understand.'' It'll be interesting to see in the episodes to come if Locke is a little bewildered if not disappointed by what may appear to him as Smokey's leniency.

As much as I liked seeing Locke stick it to Ben, I worry. For starters, there's always the possibility that Ben actually has Locke right where he wants him — that Ben is still in control, and until that truly changes, Locke is only as powerful as Ben allows him to be. But I also worry that something has gone wrong in the John Locke reboot. I detected a strong whiff of smug arrogance wafting from him, a scent that reminds me of another strong, strapping, middle-aged power player who factored prominently in the episode. I can't help wondering if that strong hint of Euro dude Charles Widmore wafting off Locke was meant to foreshadow the idea that, like the other Other-Heroes that have come before him, Locke is destined to go rotten. They say pride goeth before the fall. Last night, Locke delivered on Part One of the equation. Uh-oh.

Charles Widmore, circa 1977: A cool fantasy hero stud saddled with atrocious hair. I asked my wife what he looked like to her. Response: ''A mushroom.'' Widmore was pissed that Richard had brought Young Ben to The Temple. Richard neutralized him with four words: ''Jacob wanted it done.'' This is pretty significant: We now know this unseen entity has held sway over The Others since at least 1977. Why did the mention of ''Jacob'' shut Widmore up? Probably because he felt threatened. It's been suggested that Jacob likes to play favorites, so Widmore probably realized right away that Ben represented a rival. You know what they say: Keep your friends close — and your future replacements closer.

One of the episode's blockbuster revelations was that Charles Widmore had ordered Ben to kill Rousseau shortly after her arrival on The Island. Perhaps it was a leadership evaluation, akin to how Locke had been challenged by Ben and Alpert to murder his father back in Season 3. (Was Ben being assessed to fill Eloise ''Ellie'' Hawking's shoes? After all, she was mysteriously MIA from all the flashbacks.) Anyway, arriving at Rousseau's tent, Ben discovered that the frazzled Frenchie had given birth to a child. Suddenly, all of his snakey heartlessness slithered away. Behold Ben's Achilles' Heel: Moms. Which makes sense. His own Bad Daddy had pumped him full of guilt for his mother's death during childbirth. Mamas are the line that this Locke-killing, Dharma-purging fiend just can't cross. So he spared Rousseau's life and returned to camp with Infant Alex and got scolded by soup-sucking Chuck for being so darn empathetic. ''You were supposed to exterminate that woman,'' Widmore said. Yet Ben stood his ground — and stood up to Widmore. ''Is this what Jacob wants?'' Ben asked. Then, he dared Widmore to kill Baby Alex himself. Widmore just walked away. Meanwhile, Richard Alpert watched, and his eyelined eyes made me wonder if he was thinking ''Time for a regime change.''

Yes, Widmore played the jerk in this drama. Yet we must ask ourselves: Was he correct? It all depends on if you think everything that has happened during the Ben era of The Island was supposed to happen. And for now, I am taken with the notion that it wasn't. Benjamin Linus was a stop-gap for John Locke who outlived his usefulness, a mistake that won't go away, and his ongoing struggle to remain essential to The Island's story (if not simply survive) has created history that deviates from destiny. We know, of course, that Fate can correct an altered course, but either its repair job is following a long-term, slow-developing plan, or Survivor Ben, cockroach resilient, has been outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting Fate at every turn. So far, at least. Just as Desmond learned in Season 3, you can only cheat The Island for so long. Widmore seemed to be warning Ben of this as he was being led to The Galaga for his exile. ''If... The Island wants her dead, she'll be dead,'' Widmore said, speaking of Ben's decision to spare Rousseau and save Alex for himself. ''And one day you'll be the one standing where I'm standing, and you’ll realize you can't fight the inevitable. I'll be seeing you, boy.'' FUN FACT! ''Be seeing you!'' was the creepy salutation that the Others-like inhabitants of The Village said to each other in Patrick McGoohan's classic Lost forebearer, The Prisoner.

We heard why Charles Widmore was exiled from The Island, though we didn't see the drama that produced the event, and I hope one day we will. For now: Gossip. According to Ben, Widmore fathered a child (Penelope) with an ''outsider'' (not yet seen), spent too much time off The Island, and exploited The Island for selfish gain. Of course, unless I am misunderstanding all the passports and cash and fine threads in Linus' closet, it looked as if Ben was ultimately guilty of similar sins. Are you beginning to get the sense that life as Big Chief Other ain't all that it's cracked up to be? Inevitably, you end up spending too much time worrying about staying in power, as well as spending too much time trying to get whatever it is that you ain't getting (or what you're not supposed to get) on The Island.

There was a moment right before Widmore's departure scene that had a weird vibe to it. We saw a twentysomething Ben with a laughable Clay Aiken haircut pushing Alex on the Dharmaville swings. They were happy. Richard walked over, also beaming with joy. Purging dozens if not hundreds of hippie scientists with cynanide gas = good for the soul. (My prediction, by the way, is that our time-traveling castaways will be long gone from doomed Dharmatown before The Purge ever happens circa early nineties.) Anyway, Ben gave Alex a big push and then Richard said, ''Any higher and you'll fly her off the island.'' Richard and Ben then exchanged an awkward glance, as if the ageless enigma had just put his foot in his mouth. What did you guys make of that? Feel free to shoot me a theory at JeffJensenEW@aol.com.

We also found out why Ben boarded Ajira 316 all battered and bloody. He had gone to the marina to fulfill his promise to kill Widmore's daughter in retaliation for Alex's death. Classy as always, Ben gave Chuck a jingle to let him know that his runaway child and mother of his never-seen grandson was about to get pumped full of lead. He dropped the name of Desmond's boat, ''Our Mutual Friend,'' named after the Charles Dickens' novel that housed the love letter that kept the Hatch-trapped Scot going during his darkest days. The book, which I have not read, chronicles the consequences of an inheritance that is ceded to other people after the intended heir goes mysteriously MIA and fails to pick it up — which sounds an awful lot like the theory that Ben somehow usurped the Island destiny originally slated for Locke, a mistake that The Island has been madly trying to correct.

We saw Ben pop a cap into Desmond. Right? We agree that we did see that? Okay, so a bag of groceries got in the way, but unless Desmond had some bulletproof cans of haggis in that bag, bruthuh should have been dead, or at least severely wounded. Ben moved down the pier, saw Penelope, exchanged some words, raised his gun… and then he saw Young Charlie. Once again, Ben's weakness for new moms and kids got the best of his hard ass. He lowered his weapon — and then got leveled by miraculously okay Desmond, who sacked him like a blitzing linebacker. And then came yet another classic Ben beatdown, with Desmond pounding the snot out of Bug-Eye's face, just like Jack did at the end of Season 3. The Scot then tossed Ben in the water, which allowed for the brutal visual poetry of underwater Ben barfing blood into the sea.

What was most interesting about this scene, though, was what we didn't see — namely, what happened afterward. How did Desmond survive that near-point blank shooting? Did The Island intervene from afar as it did with Jack and Michael's suicide attempts? How did Ben get fished out of the water? Who fished Ben out of the water? How did his damaged arm get put in that sling? Because Ben was sporting that sling in the episode ''316'' when we saw him calling Jack from a pay phone at the marina. Perhaps Desmond pulled him out the drink in order to ask him some ''Why did you do that, bruthuh?'' kind of questions — but that would blow a hole in the prevalent fan theory that Desmond is now en route to The Island to finish off Ben in order to protect his family from future attacks. If that's what Desmond wanted, why didn't he just make sure Ben was dead at the docks?

QUICK HITS

Is Caesar dead? No. The Island will heal him.

''What lies in the shadow of the statue?'' Ilana — the bounty hunter who was bringing Sayid back to Fiji when he got zapped back to The Island — teamed up with some other toughs on the plane and cracked open a giant steel case full of weapons and staged their takeover of the Ajira Airlines castaways. Looks like somebody came to The Island prepared for a hostile takeover, if not a war — perhaps the very same war Charles Widmore spoke to Locke about. Ilana gave Lapidus a sphinx-like riddle test that made her sound as if she was intimately acquainted with The Island's ancient mythology. (He flunked, and got hit over the head for his trouble.) No doubt the statue refers to old Four Toe, aka the Egyptian god Anubis. What lies in its shadow? For now, my money is on Jughead. Regardless, I’m hoping upcoming episodes will reveal more about these radicals who have infiltrated The Island via Ajira 316 and what kind of perspective they have on The Island.

''Dead is Dead.'' The episode's title came from Ben’s speech to Sun trying to convince her that while Locke did indeed die, this new Locke represents something he couldn't explain. ''And it scares the hell out of me,'' Ben said. Yet even as Locke was trying to assure Sun that ''I assure you, Sun, I am the same man I've always been,'' he also possesses new Island memories and/or instincts that he didn’t have before, like knowledge about the crack in the Temple wall where Smokey resided. Is Locke merely attuned to the mind of The Island itself — or has he become an afterlife Island entity akin to Christian Shepherd?

Many things I've glossed over, from the firmly established link between The Others and The Whispers, to the significance of Locke's curiosity (and derision?) about why Ben moved The Others into Dharmaville. What did you make of that? Send me emails at JeffJensenEW@aol.com or post below!

My favorite line of the episode is the line I leave you with.

BEN: ''Okay. Have a great day!''

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid18731220001?bclid=18673145001&bctid=18766693001


http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20271322,00.html?xid=email-alert-lost-20090409-item1

EW Doc Jenson: 'Lost': Theorize and Shine

No new episode this week, but Doc Jensen fills the void with some ideas for alternative entertainment, a foundation for next week's ''Namaste,'' a little Rose and Bernard talk, and, most important, your answers to the Doc's Theory-Making Challenge!

NAMASTE The title of next week's episode, the way Dr. Marvin Candle concludes all of his orientation films -- and a sneaky anagram

By Jeff Jensen

No Lost tonight means no teases today. And a nation grieves. Why is there no Lost tonight? Maybe to allow the Powers That Be ample time to make sure the back half of their season really rocks. But more likely, it's because ABC wants to make sure it gets as many episodes of Lost into the May sweeps period as possible. (My understanding is that there could be one more break like this, falling right after episode 12.) My suggestions for alternative activities?

1. Read Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
2. See Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder.
3. Watch Dexter on DVD.
4. Listen to the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon.
5. Catch up on back episodes of Totally Lost. (New episodes resume next week!)
6. Create some art of your own.
7. Spend time with your significant other and/or family...but only if you really have nothing else to do.
8. Do good deeds for your fellow man. Or pray, but again, only after you've exhausted the aforementioned, more important possibilities.

NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE IS CALLED "NAMASTE''
That's the salutation that Dr. Marvin Candle uses to conclude all of his orientation films. It's Sanskrit for ''I bow to the divine in you,'' although there are multiple meanings. Here's a video I found that meditates on the robust spiritual philosophy embodied by ''Namaste.'' Warning: The following exceeds the suggested daily dosage of spiritual enlightenment.



Of course, as I love to point out, ''Namaste'' is also an anagram for ''Me Satan.'' Spooky! And whenever I point that bit of business out, I always like to also point out that the logo for Station 3: The Swan doesn't really look so much like a swan to me but rather...a snake! I'm telling you, there's something sinister lurking in the Dharma subtext....

BURNING QUESTION OF THE WEEK!
''What happened to Rose, Bernard, and the rest of the survivors at beach? Did they all get hit with flaming arrows?'' — BS LeBlanc, Dallas, TX

For some reason, I got a ton of Bernard/Rose questions this week. I guess something about ''LaFleur'' begged the question. I definitely have a good idea where Bernard might be: His actor, Sam Anderson, is currently starring in the play The Bird and Mr. Banks at The Road Theatre Company in Los Angeles through May 2. But since it appears there are only weekend performances, I personally see no reason why Mr. Anderson can't overextend himself and commute to Hawaii during the workweek and shoot episodes of Lost, even at the risk of exhaustion and compromising his stage work, no matter how cool or noble. Because seriously, what can be more important than Lost?

By the way, here's my Bernard and Rose theory. They were flashing through time along with the Sawyer group of castaways, albeit in a different part of the Island. When the time travel ordeal stopped after Locke turned the frozen donkey wheel, Bernard and Rose landed in the 1970s — and were captured by Richard Alpert's ''Others.'' Or they died from the time travel sickness, and they became...the Adam and Eve skeletons. (I've never been made sadder by the prospect of an accurate theory. RIP Bernard and Rose — theoretically speaking.)

WHO ORDERED THE PURGE?
Before we dig deeper into the Reader Mailbag and consider your theories to last week's theory-making challenge, let's talk for a moment about the Purge, which came up frequently in your submissions.

In Ben's Season 3 backstory episode, ''The Man Behind The Curtain,'' we learned that the Purge was the deadly, gassy culmination of the Others' war on Dharma. Big loser: Dharma. All of them died, except for Ben. But if you recall from the Season 4 episode ''Cabin Fever,'' you also know that Ben was not in control of the Others at the time of the Purge. He was still an angry young man, working as a Dharma janitor with his sad, mean father, though clearly yearning for a life/career change. And nothing facilitates self-improvement like helping facilitate mass murder.

Bottom line: Ben was following an order, not issuing them. So who gave the order? Many theories are in circulation. There's Jacob, of course. Richard Alpert is also a prime candidate. But in the wake of ''The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,'' surely we must put Charles Widmore at the top of our list of suspects. Yet last week, I had an epiphany while re-watching the ''Cabin Fever'' scene where Ben talks about the Purge. Watch — and most important, listen:



Did you hear how Ben responded to Hurley's question? He said, ''Their leader's.'' At least, that's what I thought I heard at the time the episode aired. But rewatching the clips last week, I heard something very different. What if that apostrophe is actually in the wrong place? In other words, I am proposing that the line was actually this:

''Their leaders'.''

What if the Others had multiple leaders at the time of the Purge? Given the presence of the castaways in the Island past, could we be headed toward some big, dark twist that the leaders of the Others during the time of The Purge were... the castaways themselves?!?

DOC JENSEN'S THEORY-MAKING CHALLENGE!
Last week, in my recap of ''LaFleur,'' I wrote the following:

''[Juliet's] terror over possibly facilitating more Island-baby death broke my heart — and made my mind spin. Interesting how her thought process on that has evolved to a place where she blames herself for those infants, like she has some kind of Island curse. But Sawyer brought up a provocative idea: Maybe the Island's anti-baby policy was inspired by an event that has not occurred yet.... My challenge to you: Give me a theory that makes Sawyer's logic work. JeffJensenEW@aol.com is how to reach me directly...if you dare.''

Well, many of you dared. HUNDREDS of you dared, in fact. I got so many theories, it crashed my mailbox. I must say, I wasn't expecting that kind of response, and before I say one thing more: Thank you for reading, and thank you for participating. I tried my best to read every e-mail before writing this week's column, and I'll continue reading them over the next few weeks. Here's a small sampling of your thinking:

''I think that it all has to do with Jin, who was able to get Sun pregnant on the Island; who crossed paths with pregnant Rousseau; who was present at Aaron's birth; who was on the island when Amy gave birth.'' —TC Peters, Davenport, IA

In other words: Jin is the fertility god of the Island! No Jin, no babies! Jin = Isis. JIN IS THE FOUR-TOED STATUE!

''My theory is that perhaps the frozen donkey wheel had not been turned yet. Maybe the fertility issues were caused by the first time the Island became dislodged in time. It is really simplistic, but it might work.'' —Lauren, South Pasadena, CA

Lauren's theory is a popular one. To be clear, I don't think there's anything simplistic about fertility problems caused by a glitch in the time-space continuum — but I can roll with this.

''Only a certain number of souls can obtain permanent residency on the Island. And being born there earns you that right. That child — along with Alex — were the last souls allowed. The allotted amount was full until baby Aaron was born. Hey, is Amy's baby the future boyfriend of Alex?'' —Greg Reed, Madison, WI

An interesting possibility. Could this mean that the Island allowed Aaron to be born in order to compensate for the losses of Ethan and Goodwin, two longtime Island residents who perished just prior to Aaron's birth? As for the theory that Amy's baby is Karl: This also has been a popular conjecture, but the timing doesn't work for me. Baby Goodspeed was born in 1977. That means that Karl would have been 27 when he died. Could that kid really have been that old? I'm dubious.

By far, the most popular theory that I received — articulated in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different e-mails — goes something like this:

''The anti-baby policy started after the Purge. The Island said ''No way are you going to be able to procreate when you killed my children.'' The Others were basically punished for their actions.'' —Cheri, Columbia, MO

Another popular twist on the same theory: that the toxic gasses used by the Others/Hostiles to wipe out Dharma messed up their reproductive plumbing. Now, I'm no expert in toxic gasses, but I'm not totally convinced late-term pregnancy mother/infant death is among the long-term side effects. Nonetheless, I do like the idea that the Island has punished its chosen people — the Others — for their lack of faithfulness. Given how much Lost has cribbed from The Bible, this kind of cursing reminds me of, say, Adam and Eve getting cursed and tossed out of Eden by God for eating the apple, or the Israelites being forced to wander the desert for 40 years because they were too scared to invade Canaan, or Moses being denied entry into the Promised Land for not properly following God's instruction. You get the sense that the Island demands penance for disobedience. Remember how Locke was denied use of his voice as punishment for losing his faith in the Hatch. Perhaps that's one more reason why the Island required his death before it allowed him back: It was his punishment for letting Ben turn the frozen donkey wheel instead of doing what he was told to do, which was turn the darn thing himself.

P.S.: All this God talk reminds me of what actor Terry O'Quinn recently told the Los Angeles Times. Most of the Island-is-God theories that I've ever come across — and that I've concocted myself — have made the assumption that the Island is a benevolent entity. A prickly and demanding entity, but ultimately benevolent. Yet O'Quinn is unconvinced:

''What [Locke] perceives, his understanding of the island, is special. But it might be the road to hell. We still don't know what the moral entity of the island is. Is the island a good guy or a bad guy? That is the question I have.''

Casting the Island as possibly a devilish personality — or perhaps more terrifying, as an unreliable God, or perhaps a God who just doesn't like us very much — opens up new theory-making possibilities, and would certainly radically alter the science/faith theme running through the series. The side of spirituality has been winning in recent weeks — but who's to say the supernatural forces at work in Lost are working on behalf of humanity's best interests? More on this — and more of our Why-the-Island-Hates-Babies theories — next week.

AND THE WINNER OF DOC JENSEN'S WEEKLY NO PRIZE IS...
Last week, I gave you my ''reasonable facsimile'' theory of Locke's resurrection — that Locke wasn't really Locke, but an Island creation imprinted with Locke's consciousness. I confessed to having ripped that idea off from a famous comic book character's origin story and challenged you to smoke out my reference. And while I got a number of great guesses (Vision/Wonder Man, Phoenix, The Multiple Man), it was Sander Klein who got the one I was thinking of: ''I believe that you are referring to Alan Moore's re-invention of The Swamp Thing.''

That's all I have for you this week. Back next week with more Doc Jensen, more Totally Lost (big tease for next week's episode: ''Munchies!'') and most important, more Lost. Until then: Me Satan — er, I mean, Namaste! http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20264756,00.html?xid=email-alert-lost-20090311-item1