Uncharted Island

Okay, I needed more space! It’s the commercial break immediately following Sawyer’s plunge into the ocean.

Another Sayid hit. Long hair is quite becoming on him, even though he is a hitman.

“I think visiting hours are over, dude.”

What circumstances have changed? Bentham’s dead, two days ago.

Sayid stopped Hurley from saying who Bentham really is. Guessing that it’s Ben seems too easy, too obvious. Bentham? They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Hurley was playing chess against Mr. Eko. Does Hurley get to talk to everyone who died on the island?

Keamy’s last words. “Wherever you go, Widmore will find you.”
“Not if I find him first.”

And there’s the red light.

That was too tense. I couldn’t type at all until this commercial break. Sun watching Jin run up onto the deck of the ship as they pulled away on the helicopter… Oh my God. It’s a miracle they were able to keep her from jumping. They would’ve had to hold me back, in her place.

And Christian showing up to bid Michael farewell? A nice touch. “You can go now.” So I was right. The island was done with him. He was allowed to die. So Hurley did know that Michael was dead when Walt came to visit him in the mental hospital. Desmond would’ve been able to tell him that Michael stayed behind to give everyone else a chance to get off the boat.

I suppose it is possible that Jin could’ve survived. He was on the very edge of the deck when the first explosion occured. He could’ve jumped…

Who is the second man that Sun blames for Jin’s death?

Sun is meeting Mr. Widmore in London. Curious. She’s calling him on his knowledge about the island. Is she going to be able to make him an offer he can’t refuse? “As you know, we’re not the only ones who left the island.” Is she talking about Ben?

“If I were you, I’d duck.”

Is Ben moving the island? Jack told Frank to go back to the island. Moving it would be a good reason for that not to happen.

“Is that our boat?”
“It was.”

Good reason to be drinking DHARMA rum, Juliet. But isn’t it odd that they can see the smoke from the wreckage of the freighter from across the island’s border protections? I think it’s odd.

Right now, Sawyer is just wondering if he made a great decision that just saved his life, or a terrible decision because he left Kate to die while saving his own sorry hide.

Ben’s going somewhere cold. Jacob didn’t tell Locke how to move the island because he didn’t want Locke to suffer the consequences. Whoever moves the island can never come back. This is when Ben ends up in Tunisia. He loses the better part of a year.

“You’ll find your way, John. You always do.” He told Locke how to assume leadership of the Others. Whoa.

Richard Alpert knows. He was expecting it. “Welcome home.”

Ben had to destroy the Vault to get behind it through the hole in the wall, hence all the metal. He’s got a crowbar. Quite the tunnel through there. To a chamber of ice. A broken ladder. Jacob’s ladder? That’s how Ben hurts his arm.

There’s a big friggin’ wheel. Frozen.

“I hope you’re happy now, Jacob.”

Ben seems like way too much fo a wuss to be able to turn that big ol’ wheel that moves the whole island. Is the sky about to turn purple again?

There is a bright light emanating from this wheel. And Ben just got pixellated like Hurley did earlier.

Wow. That was a bright light. And… whoosh. It was gone. That was pretty cool. Except that it sucks for everyone on that raft Dan had, and for the people in the helicopter who were hoping to get back to the island. How do you hold onto a baby when your helicopter crashes into the ocean?

This underwater sequence is too freaky and disturbing.

Desmond… is he okay? He can’t die!He has to get back to Penny! Come on, Jack. Oh good. The island may be gone, taking with it its magical healing powers. But CPR is still CPR.

They keep changing the type of film they’re shooting on. It’s very distracting.

Is Kate about to start seeing dead people in this flash forward? Backward talking on the phone?

OMG. It’s Claire. She came to see Aaron. “Don’t bring him back, Kate. Don’t you dare bring him back.” She dreamt it, but she’s started seeing dead people, too. Only she’s not being told to go back to the island. She’s being told not to bring Aaron back.

Why is Kate telling Aaron she’s sorry?

“I can’t believe he did it.”
“Who did what?”
“Locke. He moved the island.”

“If you’ve got another explanation, man, I’d love to hear it.” Awesome, Hurley.

There’s a boat. This is such a reflection of the season one finale.

“We have to lie.”

This is where the lying starts. Kate doesn’t think they can pull it off, but Jack thinks they can, if they let him do all the talking.

The Searcher. IT’S PENNY’S BOAT!

I’m so happy for Penny and Desmond that I’nm crying. That kiss may be even better than the one Sawyer gave Kate tonight.

“How did you find me?”
“Your phone call. I have a tracking station.”

If they’re going to lie about everything, I guess Penny Widmore is the one who can help them pull it off.

Octagon Global Recruiting. What was that ad all about?

One week later. Membata. Penny’s going to help them stage their fake rescue. “Just long enough to give you a nice, convincing sunburn.”

Well, that explains how Desmond and Frank don’t have to be explained.

“Don’t let ‘em find you, Desmond.”

“I’ll see you in another life, brother.” Nice turnabout.

At least they got a nice week to relax on Penny’s boat before having to start living their life as a lie.

Jack’s flash forward, back at the Hoffs/Drawlar funeral home. He’s gonna break in. To look in the coffin? See if Betham is really dead? The coffin is much bigger now, I think.

Ben is talking to Jack. Alive? “Did he tell you I was off the island?”

“He told me that, after I left the island, some very bad things happened, and it was my fault for leaving. And I had to go back.”

“The island won’t let you come alone. All of you have to go back.”

Ben has a few ideas.

Dammit. Everyone who said that Locke was in the coffin was right. Dammit. Dammit. DAMMIT!

Locke is Jeremy Bentham.

Wow, these scenes from “Previously on LOST…” are a real blast from the past!

There’s a motley crew. Claire, Aaron, Danielle, Karl, Alex, Kate, Ben, Hurley, Sawyer… then Sawyer parades Miles in, sans bomb in the mouth.

It’s exposition time! For everyone who hasn’t been paying attention for the past few weeks.

That alarm on the freighter sounds like the push the button alarm from the Swan. Yikes for Desmond!

Sayid to Michael: “Why are you here on this boat?”

Michael to Sayid: “I’m here to die.”

Um… what? That seems to easy to be the answer to the promo spot that said someone was going to die this week.

Ben told Alex that the people from the freighter are more dangerous than he is. Assuming he’s telling the truth, it might not be the truth we thought we heard. Maybe they’re more dangerous to him, and by extension, to Alex. Not necessarily to everyone else. I’m not sure if I buy the “they’re going to kill everyone else once they have me” bit. Although that would certainly be a reason for the Oceanic Six to have their cover story following the rescue.

SWOOSH! Flashback time.

We’re going way back. Wait, Michael’s accident was a suicide attempt? That sheds a new light on a lot of things.

Libby! I knew that sounded like her voice!

So this isn’t so far back as his accident pre-flight. Okay, verification that this is post-island. Walt is staying with his grandmother, and having nightmares. Michael was only missing for two months after the crash. No time variation there. Then again, I firmly believe that any time anomalies began after the fail-safe key was turned. And since they left the island shortly after that happened, there wouldn’t be too much of a difference.

Ramming his car into a dumpster didn’t work, so now he pawned Mr. Paik’s really expensive watch for a gun to shoot himself… and he was stopped by Tom. Whoa. How long after he left the island is this taking place? Because Tom was seen quite often on the island… telling Kate she wasn’t his type, needling Sawyer in the polar bear cage, fretting over Ben on the operating table… And he’s just there at the right moment, at just the right spot in New York City to stop Michael from shooting himself? He had an apropos greeting, too, asking Michael for the time right after he pawned the watch.

Tom’s got a mean right hook!

Oh man, Michael told Walt about Ana-Lucia and Libby. Father of the Year, I tell ya. (Sarcasm, in case you didn’t catch it.)

So the island won’t let Michael kill himself? So all on-island deaths are people who are “supposed” to die, then. And anyone who miraculously lives through something that should’ve been fatal… the island doesn’t want them to die. Yet. Because the island allowed Naomi to heal from her bail-out wounds, but not the stab wound. And Charlie got a number of reprieves before he finally died. (I should do an entry about all of the times Charlie almost died before he died.) Maybe that’s why Mikhail seems to have more lives than a cat - the island wasn’t done with him yet. But did he die his final death yet?

Ooh, timeline. Flight 815 was just “found” at the bottom of the ocean.

Arutro! That’s why Kate wasn’t his type! Some people called it when he first said it.

Tom says that Widmore planted the fake wreckage. Widmore’s freighter captain said that Ben planted it.

Eww! Graverobbing was the source of all of those dead bodies. Well, at least he didn’t kill people to come up with the bodies.

Who to believe? Did Ben plant the wreckage? Or did Widmore? I almost asked, “Or maybe they’re working together?” But then I realized how ridiculous that sounded. Widmore wouldn’t be searching for the island if he was working with Ben, because then he’d know how to get there.

So Michael is swabbing decks in order to kill everyone on board the freighter. And according to Miles, the people on the freighter arer there to get Ben and then kill everyone left on the island. This isn’t another Purge, this is a war. I’m beginning to think that the cover story the Oceanic Six are telling is covering up a horrible massacre - but will it be the castaways or Widmore’s people who die?

Fiji! Must be easier to fake Fiji when filming in Hawaii than it is to fake Manhattan.

Minkowski when he was still sane. Naomi has a crate that was delivered for “Kevin Johnson.” What has Ben shipped him? Miles knew that Michael’s name wasn’t Kevin. How? And does he suspect the truth? He can’t. Can he?

Naomi argued with Frank about who was going to go to the island first. Maybe it would’ve turned out better for Naomi if she’d let Frank go first.

Frank is a conspiracy nut, it seems. But not really, since he was totally right about the conspiracy, even if he has the details a little fuzzy about who’s responsible for it.

Michael’s hearing the whispers in the engine room of the freighter? And seeing Libby? Whoa. “NOT YET.” This is the island refusing to let him die. And there is definitely something supernatural about this.

“You going Nicholson on us?” The Shining. Hehe.

Walt called? Or is this Tom saying he’s Walt? Oh, Ben pretending he’s Walt.

Ben won’t kill innocent people? I think the members of DHARMA would disagree.

Huh. Ben wants Michael to make him a list. He’s big on lists. So Michael makes the list, and Michael is the saboteur that destroys the radio and the engine room.

Sayid blows Michael’s cover. Could this be the moment that Sayid realizes he screwed up and is later responsible for the deaths of many innocent people, and that’s why he ends up working for Ben off-island?

Oh my God. Karl’s dead. He did have a bad feeling about this. Ben was playing them. Why else would Karl and Danielle end up dead, but Alex is still alive? I would bet that Mikhail or one of Ben’s other cronies was the assassin.

So we finally see Regina, and she’s pretending to be reading outside the room holkding Sayid and Desmond.

Lima beans. Yummy. I would gag on every bite, but I guess that would be better than starving.

Sun doesn’t want to pick a name for the baby until they get off the island. I can understand that. “Deal.”

And Sun does get off the island. We “knew” that. But she makes six. And the fact that she has to call for an ambulance just confirms what that means… Jin doesn’t get off the island.

Wait… Jin? Jin! He wants a panda for the baby. So… Aaron didn’t count in the Oceanic 6 then. Fake out!

Oh look, a note! “DON’T TRUST THE CAPTAIN.” In very boxy letters, like a kid had written it.

Is the captain the guy who talked to Frank at the beginning of the episode? (Incidentally, I needed to hear him say la-PEE-dus. I thought that it was LAP-id-us.) He looks familiar to me, and I don’t know why.

Sun’s doctor is away at a conference. I don’t trust that to be the truth. We’ve already seen Hurley being manipulated by Abaddon. I think this replacement doctor is somehow connected to Widmore. Or is otherwise shady and trying to get his hands on the baby. I don’t think he’s on the level.

Poor Jin, lost his panda and his cab. What’s the deal with the panda? Does it have some sort of significance in Korean culture?

Not a good time, Bernard. Well, maybe they can have a man to man talk. Ha… Bernard babbling about marriage. “We must be the good guys.”

Is that Morse code being banged on the pipes? Even though I’m a fan of Jericho, I still know nothing of Morse code.

Regina just jumped off the side of the boat wrapped in chains. Um… wth?

I just used IMDB to check up on the captain. I have no idea why I recognize him.

And the good ol’ captain just confirmed that Ben wasn’t lying. The boat is Charles Widmore’s boat. Unless, of course, he’s in cahoots with Ben. But I doubt that. Oh… and we just got a good rundown of exactly what went into staging the fake wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815. Widmore didn’t do it, Ben did?

Wow, Sun is a champion pusher! She took less time pushing to get her baby out than I did!

Johnson. That’s totally Michael. Kevin Johnson, huh? Not a big surprise. But I did just hear the collective sigh of hundreds of LOST fans who had hoped against hope that Michael wasn’t going to be Ben’s man on the boat. The only thing I’m surprised about is that we saw him before the last five seconds of the episode. I thought his face would be revealed right before the end credits rolled.

“I made dinner.” Aww. Jin really has changed. Although I wonder if he’ll need to use his old skills to commandeer the helicopter when it comes back.

Whoa… it was a flashback and a flash forward. Weird!

Crap. That means that Jin doesn’t get off the island?

Okay, I’m crying now, and trying to type through my tears. Hurley came to see little Ji Yeon. Sun was just completely out of it when she asked for Jin during labor. And they went to see Jin’s grave stone…

The stone said that Jin died on September 22, 2004. The date of the plane crash. Jin doesn’t get off the island. But is he actually dead, or is he just… still on the island?

This wasn’t my epiphany. It was postulated here. Michael is Ben’s man on the boat. It would explain why we keep seeing Harold Perrineau’s name in the credits. And it would explain how Walt knows (from last season’s finale) that the guys on the boat are bad.

It drove me crazy that we never got to know who was in that coffin. We never got a really clear shot of the obituary that Jack ripped out of the newspaper. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some clever folks with TiVo and hi-def grabbed some screencaps to try and make sense of it all. But the props and editing folks were on the ball, and made it difficult to draw any real conclusions.

Facts revealed to the casual LOST viewer:

• No one showed up to the funeral except for Jack, who said he was neither friend nor family.
• The coffin looked small.

From the first part, we know it cannot be Claire or Christian in the coffin. (I know, Christian is supposed to be dead. But there are those who think he’s not.) Because Jack talks to Kate after the funeral, we know it’s not her either. From the second part, it’s not likely to be Hurley. We’re looking at the coffin’s occupant being either a child, someone really short, or someone who ends up as an amputee. Because of the [remote] possibility of an amputation, this really doesn’t rule anyone out.

We get a little bit more information dangled in front of us from an insider who leaked the text of the obituary, which admittedly may be a hoax.

What did we learn from this, the devout fans who scour the internet for this type of thing? (Assuming this information is legitimate, of course.)

• John Lantham, the alias of the dead guy, is from New York.
• He is survived by a teenage son.
• He appeared to have hung himself.
• He is a man.

The only concrete evidence this gives us is that the coffin is not occupied by a woman. A lot of people jumped to the conclusion that it’s most likely Ben, because he’s short and would be an obvious choice for having no friends to attend his funeral. Who would be his teenage son, though? I find it unlikely that he’d let Karl masquerade as his son if they both ended up off the island.

Other people think it may be Sawyer, but I think Sawyer is the “he” that Kate has to get back to.

I think the dead guy in the coffin is Michael. Assuming he and Walt didn’t perish in the open sea, he probably wouldn’t want to use his real name and draw attention to the fact that he was supposed to be dead in a plane crash. There would be far too many questions that he just doesn’t have the answer for. Let’s not forget that he murdered a few people in cold blood. It would be far harder for any of his fellow survivors to identify him if they should ever get rescued. Although it wouldn’t appear that any of them would want to attach themselves to the plane crash anyway, and certainly not to anything that happened on the island. They’ve all done things they’re not proud of.

Michael wouldn’t have many friends from the island because of his killings and because he betrayed them to the Others in order to leave with Walt. He has a teenage son that wouldn’t have to be contrived. And he’d likely have a lot of issues that could drive him to suicide - perhaps guilty feelings, perhaps estrangement from his son.

If I were a betting woman, my money would be on Michael. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.