submitted on Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 3:40:23 PM

Shawn "sprstoner" Glines is currently sitting 2nd with 10 to go at Event #13 ($2,500 NL) at the WSOP with 1.2 million chips. First prize is a cool $500k.

Meanwhile, LJ is in Day 1 of Event #17 ($1,000 NL Women's Championship) and has quickly amassed a nice stack of 11k or so.

GL to both, especially sprstoner, take it down!

  submitted on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 7:24:57 AM

Five down, one to go. I've got to admit, I'm still impressed by the writers' ability to constantly be able to throw a huge wrench into the LOST storyline and leave you wondering what the hell is going on. This week's finale was no exception.

I want to take a little bit of time to talk about the overlying story that was introduced to us, and then cover everything else with some quick hits.

First off, we have what appears to be our endgame that the show is building up to. It's been hidden from us until now, so we were all under the assumption that the "war" that has been referenced by Charles Widmore and others was something between Ben and Widmore. However, now it seems as though this battle is bigger (and older) than the both of them. The finale opens up with a flashback, probably the earliest we've seen the island, with Jacob, living his life on the island, and we are introduced to his conflict with an as of yet unnamed person.



That's what the episode opened up with, that gave us the backstory to what the episode ended with, and I believe that will be the foundation for what happens in the final season. It's all largely mysterious right now, since we don't know who this man is (Although I like the idea of thinking of him as Esau, brother to Jacob), what his purpose is (Aside from his desire to kill Jacob), who Jacob really is, what his purpose is, and what any of this has to do with the island. But, it does appear that all of that is a part of the ultimate story arc, intertwined with everyone on the island.

We also don't know how the remaining characters on the show play into all of this. We've seen their involvement in things thus far, but now what is their purpose? Widmore wanted Locke back on the island. Jacob wanted Hurley back on the island. Eloise wanted them all back on the island. But we don't know why. We don't know what their role will be, whose side they will be on.

Ultimately, I think we are set up nicely for the final season. The show seems ready to head into the final stretch. What that final stretch is, well, we don't know the whole picture yet. But at least we can finally see the road that will lead us there.

Now for some quick hits:

-So, do we want to assume that the ship Jacob was watching was the Black Rock? Because that's what I would like to do. And it certainly looked like the ship Richard was working on in the bottle last week.

-I really thought Michael Emerson did a fantastic job as Ben this week. He was completely resigned to doing whatever Locke wanted. It's a very different look for Ben, having to submit to someone else, and Emerson is pulling it off great. And even when Locke was talking him into wanting to kill Jacob, you could just see Ben's mood transform as it all processed in his head. It's one of the few times we've seen Ben's emotions get the best of him.

-So Richard doesn't age because of Jacob. Jacob apparently doesn't age because of Jacob. Locke is alive because of Jacob (At least once, we don't know about the second time). What are these abilities that Jacob has?

-I wrote down several times during the episode "WHAT IS IN THE BOX?" in big capital letters. I've got to admit, I had no idea it was Locke. None. I guess from now on any time I see a box and I know there's a mystery object inside of it, I'll just assume it's a dead John Locke.

-Anyone else think Terry O'Quinn put on some weight? I don't know what it is, but his man boobs were quite distracting all episode. Someone get that man a bro.

-"I lied. That's what I do." Kind of makes you feel sorry for Ben a little bit, doesn't it?

-Ilana is working for Jacob. Should have seen that coming. Never even occurred to me. So that revelation makes you wonder about a lot of things:

*If Ilana is working for Jacob, then she and her crew were on the flight on purpose, knowing it would get them to the island.

*You have to wonder who Eloise is working for as well, since she too knew the flight would get them to the island.

*We don't know, at the end of the day, why the LOST survivors are involved in all of this.

*Ilana is against Widmore, but legitimately doesn't seem to know who Ben is. So where does Widmore come into all of this? Is he aligned with our unnamed friend?

*Ben said in an earlier episode that he couldn't kill Widmore. Interesting parallel to the opening scene to the show where the man with no name couldn't kill Jacob.

*What was the loophole that he found? Was it the reenactment of the Oceanic flight aboard Ajira? Or was it something else? Maybe just something involving Locke? Did Widmore know about this loophole, which is why he wanted to help Locke get back to the island?

*What exactly happened to Locke? If he's still dead, then how is this other person also walking around as Locke?

*Is Jacob actually dead? It seems like kind of a buzzkill for Ilana to go through all of this to come to the island only to just miss and have Jacob get killed.

What a deep and tangled web they weave.

-Hey look, it really is Rose & Bernard! I'm actually totally okay with the show's explanation for where they've been. They've been at peace with their situation and themselves for a while now, and ultimately, they just want to be together, so I can totally buy the idea of them just living off by themselves somewhere, away from everyone. I think this was the writers' way of basically closing the book on Rose and Bernard. I think outside of some confirmation that they are Adam & Eve (Likely, but still not for sure), I don't know that we'll be seeing them again. Which is fine, I'm just glad they addressed their situation.

-What lies in the shadow of the statue? Ille qui nos omnes servabit. That's Latin for "He who will protect/save us all." No, I don't know Latin, I just looked it up on Lostpedia.

-The lunchbox that Kate tried to steal was the same lunchbox she used as the time capsule that they dug up under the tree in one of her flashbacks.

-Good choice of death for Phil. Metal rod to the chest. I approve.

-Sad to see Juliet go (Assuming she's dead, of course). I really liked her relationship with Sawyer, but at the same time, she was never part of the Oceanic crew, so ultimately their destinies probably didn't follow the same path.

-Not looking good for Sayid, is it? Him dying wouldn't be too much of a surprise either. He's been a shell of himself ever since Nadia died, which is too bad, because he was a great character before he got off the island. We'll see what happens, but it certainly doesn't look like there's much Jack can do about it.

-Miles line about considering the idea that maybe their plan with the bomb actually causes the incident, and the subsequent blank looks by everyone was priceless.

-Quite a fight between Jack and Sawyer. Although I've got to admit, kicking a guy in the balls is very uncool.

-For the record, I don't think anyone died from the bomb, except for Juliet. I also believe that the survivors are going to get knocked back into their own time. I think it's time to close the book on 1977; there's really nothing left for them to do there. Their job was to set off the bomb, cause the incident, and it's done. Now, their story must continue elsewhere, and I think the incident will lead them back to the present.

-My wife actually came up with a really great idea for how next season should start. They could have everyone back on the Oceanic flight, the flight landing, everyone getting off in Los Angeles, and then you cut to Jack's eye opening in the jungle, and it turns out it was all in his head. I hope this happens, actually.

-In keeping with the idea that everyone will wind up back in the present, I believe this is why Richard believes they all died. He knew they were going to set off the bomb, he knew it went off, and they were never seen again, so I think he inferred that to mean that they all died.

-We could have seen this whole Locke situation coming. The writers were giving us hints. Naming an episode "Dead is Dead", having Ben say that he had no idea what was going on. Even this week, Richard telling Locke he had never seen someone resurrected from the dead like that, Locke telling Richard that he wanted to kill the passengers from the Ajira flight. The signs were there that Locke was not Locke.

-Was Locke ever supposed to actually lead the Others, or was it all just a big paradoxical mistake? Richard tried to figure out if John was supposed to lead them by visiting him when he was a child, but couldn't find anything special about him. He did this because Locke told him he was supposed to lead the Others in 1954. Then, when Locke arrived on the island in 2004, Richard knew him, and subsequently knew he was supposed to be their leader, because that's what Locke told him. However, Locke had no idea he was supposed to be their leader until Richard told him that in 2004. And that was how Locke got it into his head that that was true, so when he time flashed back into 1954, he told that to Richard. It's basically a similar circumstance to the compass that the two of them passed back and forth to each other.

But perhaps Jacob was the one who ultimately told Richard that Locke was to lead, and Richard wasn't just going off of what Locke said. Still, makes you wonder if that was all a big mistake, especially considering the consequences.

-I thought the flashbacks were very mysterious. We had Jacob show up and prevent Kate from her first run in with the law, then he showed up after Sawyer's parents' funeral, when he was writing his letter to the real Sawyer, then we had him appear at Jin & Sun's wedding, he also appeared after Jack's surgery where he cut his patient's bursa sac (Kind of cool to see that story play out since we heard about it on the very first episode of the show), he was there when Locke was pushed out the window, and actually appeared to revive him, then he distracted Sayid while he was crossing the street, setting up Nadia being hit and killed by a car, and finally he met Hurley when he was released from prison, convincing him to go back to the island, and leaving him with a guitar case.

So we see Jacob interact with all of our survivors at potentially significant points in their lives, some of his interactions are meaningless, some are not. But we don't know the intention behind any of these, save for Hurley, where he actually made it clear that he wanted Hurley on the Ajira flight to go back to the island. Another mystery that we'll have to wait until next year for the answer.

Well, I'm sure I didn't cover everything, I know for sure I didn't discuss everything from 1977, but that was mostly because at the end of the day, everything there played out the way it was supposed to, with the incident going off as planned, and the writers leaving us with a huge cliff hanger, which had to be expected. I thought we might get a few seconds of post-bomb detonation to tease us with what the consequences were, but either way I knew that the incident would be the very end of the show. Either way, I put my emphasis on the present, and Jacob, and our new storyline, since that's going to be the primary focus of the show going forward.

Now we get to enjoy the 8-month break (ugh), and then come back next year for the sixth and final season. I plan on spending some time finishing re-watching season 3, which I will continue writing about on here, and perhaps try and get into re-watching season 4, since I haven't even looked at any of the DVDs yet and I've had them for a month or two now. Thanks to everyone who's been reading this year, I really do this because I love LOST and this is a nice outlet for me to discuss and theorize about the show, but I am glad to have my readers, since it helps stimulate further conversation about the show.

I suppose other than my LOST DVD posts, I'll get back to some semi-regular blogging about other subjects, so all of you can look forward to not reading that for the next eight months.

  submitted on Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 7:32:07 AM

-Richard Alpert

-Jack & Kate

So the battle of free will vs. fate and destiny continues. Actually, I'm not sure if I can phrase it that way, since Jack believes it is his destiny to exercise free will and change the past, which almost seems like a contradictory stance to take.

Jack is consumed with the idea of fixing past mistakes. This has been an essential part of his character since basically the first time we met him. He is so consumed by it that it has shown to be, at times, one of his greatest flaws. And here is another situation, where Jack can't let go of the idea that life should be tampered with to the point of erasing the last three years of history on the island (Really it's more like 30 since making changes now would effect the entire history of the island from that point on, not just starting in 2004), so that he can save the lives of the people that have died since the plane crashed.

He doesn't know if this alternate future is any better than the way things played out, but that's because he doesn't really care. Jack doesn't think that way; he is only concerned with fixing what he is capable of fixing. In this case, he believe he can "fix" the future, which ultimately to him means preventing people from dying. But is that the correct course of action? We can go back to the cliche idea when discussing time travel, if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, should you? Because that action would have unpredictable and possibly irreparable changes on the future. Yes, you would be trying to rid the world of a genocidal maniac, but at what cost? How would that affect the rest of history? It's the same situation here. Jack wants to prevent the people that have died since the show started. But what does that mean for everything else?

-If Jack prevents the incident, what if that leads to Dharma bringing back all the women and children? What if that means when Dharma is "purged", all of those women and children who were off the island end up dead with everyone else.

-Kate would spend the rest of her life in prison.

-Sun would leave Jin in LA, and they would never rekindle their relationship.

-Rose would die of cancer.

-John Locke would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair in a meaningless job.

-Sawyer would spend the rest of his life incomplete, unable to find the man who killed his parents.

-Juliet would continue to be a prisoner on the island.

And really, these issues are just scratching the surface of the problem, there could be much, much more severe consequences from preventing the incident that we can't even imagine.

Now, all that being said, we still don't even know if it's possible to stop anything. And considering all we have to go on is Faraday saying it's possible, and he then proceeded to fall in line with the rest of history by being shot and killed by his mother, how much credibility does he have at the moment?

I think it's much more likely that Jack helps create the incident, when in fact his inaction would have prevented it to begin with. He actually reminds me a lot of Locke at the end of Season 2. Locke became so convinced, based on information that he was exposed to (and consequently arrived at the wrong conclusions), that he completely destroyed the computer in the hatch that let you input the numbers, and only after it was too late did he realize his mistake. I see Jack heading down a similar path, only now Desmond isn't here to save him.

Some quick hits:

-Richard said he watched them all die. I think they kept that vague on purpose. Sun only has a picture of Jack, Kate, and Hurley. She mentioned Jin, but that was it. And no one even brought up Sawyer, Juliet, Sayid, or Miles. So which of these people is Richard talking about? And does he even know for sure that anyone died? Let's say they disappeared, and went back to their own time, but Richard didn't know it, and just thought they died, instead. It was a chilling statement for him to make, but it was made out to be very unclear, so for now I'm not taking it to mean much of anything.

-After Eloise got done talking to Jack and Kate in her tent, she went out and had a conversation with Charles. Did anyone else see him place his hand on her stomach? It could have just been an affectionate gesture, but it almost seemed to me like it was something you would do when someone when they were pregnant. Plus, he mentioned something about her going to the bomb in her 'condition'.

-I thought it was interesting that Richard didn't know why Locke had disappeared. For someone that has been on the island for so long, I would have expected him to be aware of something like that. Although, Locke in general seems to throw Richard off a little bit.

-So the Others went back to their old tents/huts after Ben and Locke left. I take that to mean that moving into the Dharma barracks was Ben's idea, and perhaps not one shared by Richard?

-Seems like we learned a couple of things about Dharma: First, that Horace is kind of a wuss, and that Radzinsky is higher up on the food chain than I first thought. It's still Horace's show, but clearly Radzinsky is in a high enough position to take charge if he wants. Dr. Chang seems to be the lead scientist on the island, but I don't know how much real power he actually has.

-Phil is so screwed. I'm looking forward to his death.

-Great dialogue with Hurley and Chang. I also really liked the scene later where Miles realized why his father sent him and his mother off the island.

-This whole Richard/Locke/Ben triangle has provided us with a cool little dynamic. Locke is trying to fit into his new role as leader of the Others, Richard is doing his best to accommodate Locke, but seems a little perplexed by some of Locke's requests, and Ben is the old boss, just sort of sitting back and mocking Locke at any chance he gets. There are clearly things that Ben and Richard know about that they haven't shared with Locke, which might not be a good idea, since this seems to be a much more educated Locke than what we saw three years ago.

-I listened to a podcast this morning which had a great theory...whatever map Sawyer was drawing is the basis for the map Radzinsky created on the blast door in the Swan. Fantastic idea, I hope it's true.

-We went through this period of time where we knew people weren't going to die. At the end of season 3, we saw Kate, and Jack, and eventually the rest of the 6 off the island, in the future. So we knew they weren't going to die. Then, we saw Jack, and Kate, and Hurley back on the island, so we knew they weren't going to die. But now, like Faraday said, any one of them can die. And I think the LOST writers know that we've moved back into this phase of uncertainty, so they can go back to teasing major character deaths, just like they did with Kate, making us think she got shot. Well played, writers.

-How do you get a 200-ton hydrogen bomb out of a tunnel?

-How awesome was the touching scene with Sawyer and Juliet on the sub, and then the subsequent ruining of said touching scene by Kate showing up. The awkwardness factor was through the roof, and Juliet looked like she wanted to take a gun to Kate's head and just put an end to it.

-Sayid brings up a good point. Jack seems to implicitly trust 1977 Eloise, and that is due in large part to him trusting 2007 Eloise. But wouldn't 2007 Eloise know that Jack trusted 1977 Eloise and use that to her advantage to get him to go back to the island? It's a bit circular, but needless to say I'm not so sure Jack is correct in placing all of his faith with this woman.

-Can Locke kill Jacob? Is Jacob even alive? Is he even a person? I hope he's thought this out a little bit. Ben seemed pretty floored by the idea as well. Will Richard allow it? Is there anything he can do to stop it? What about the smoke monster, does he have a role in any of this?

-Did anyone else miss the "We're going out on an adventure in the jungle" music? I know I did. I don't think we've heard it since the Oceanic survivors made the trek to the radio tower at the end of season 4.

Should be a heck of a finale. Jack's got a hydrogen bomb, Locke is trying to kill the "ruler" of the island, Kate's trying to stop Jack, we get to find out what our Shadow of the Statue people have in that big metal box of theirs. I'm also expecting someone of significance to die. Miles is probably the leading candidate at the moment, especially since he was able to reveal to his father that he is, in fact, his son. Kate might also be appropriate, since Jack is trying to prevent the incident to save everyone, so his actions resulting in her death would work; although I'm not sure the writers want to kill her off with still another season left in the show.

  submitted on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 8:07:31 AM

Hey look, it's a plot! I mentioned several weeks ago after The Six arrived back on the island that the show seemed to be lacking in overall purpose. The main story of the survivors trying to get back to the island was concluded (Not completely, since they ended up in two different time periods, but for the most part). There wasn't really anything for them to do in 1977 except for the challenge of integrating into society on the island. And obviously there was some kind of end game that the show was ultimately working towards, but we weren't there yet. So the drive of the show was a little bit in limbo. This turned out to not be such a bad thing, as we were given some further exposition regarding the island, as well as its inhabitants. But still, in the back of my head I've been waiting for the show to find some kind of purpose to work with. Locke's primary goal in 2007 seems to be reuniting with the other survivors, or at the very least helping Sun find Jin again. A nice side story, but probably not enough to drive the show. Now, trying to stop the Incident from happening? There's a storyline I can get behind.

It's probably not a long storyline arc, since the season finale will most likely be dealing with the Incident, but even still, it gives the audience something to be engaged in. Even if we don't believe that anyone can prevent the Incident from happening (and I don't), Faraday had to have left just a little bit of doubt in your minds when talking about themselves as "variables", capable of changing things, didn't he? Can they actually do anything to stop the Incident? Or is this all the way things are supposed to play out? Everything goes on as planned, the Incident happens, Dr. Chang loses his arm, things at Dharma go back to normal, Radzinski operates the Swan, and Ben grows up and wipes the Dharma Initiative out.

Perhaps the only real variable on the show is what happens to the survivors, although that's only a mystery to us. The powers that be on the island already know their fate, at least to a certain extent. But as far as we're concerned, just like Daniel said, any one of them could die. We don't know who lives, who dies, where everyone will end up, when everyone will end up. It's all a big mystery thus far.

Some quick hits:

-I know this was technically a Faraday-centric episode, but I felt like we learned more about Eloise Hawking than we did about Daniel Faraday. And we certainly learned quite a lot about her, didn't we? As screwed up as the whole situation is, how determined does she have to be to raise her child, and push him his whole life into a career in physics, solely because she knows it is ultimately his destiny to go back to the island she grew up on and eventually be shot and killed by her. That's some heavy stuff to have to hold on to.

Now, obviously Daniel's destiny was more than to go back in time and get killed by his mother. We don't know yet entirely what his ultimate purpose; I've speculated that he built the pendulum in the Lamp Post, and who knows what else he was able to accomplish.

Either way, this goes back to the broad idea of destiny, something that Eloise clearly believes in strongly. So the question has to be asked: when and why did she develop such a strong conviction to fate, and destiny? We saw it before with Desmond during his deja vu/flashback/life flashing before his yes/whatever. And we see it now with Faraday. She is absolutely committed to this idea that you can't change what happened, and that things must play out the way they're supposed to (Remember the man in the red shoes who she let die during Desmond's deja vu?). But where did this idea come from? She must have seen something, or encountered some kind of evidence to sway her towards this idea.

-I'm about 99.5% sure that Faraday is dead. And if he's not dead, he's going to die eventually. Eloise Hawking made it very clear during her flashback that she was very distraught about Daniel going to the island. She wouldn't have been so distraught if she knew he got shot and then survived. The only, only reason I would speculate that he might not be dead yet is because last year at a Comic Convention, they showed a video of Dr. Pierre Chang going on about the fate of the island, the Purge, what happens in the future, etc., and Daniel Faraday was the one taping it. It had to have been filmed after the episode we saw last night, given Dr. Chang's reaction to Faraday's idea regarding time travel. However...there is no definitive say whether or not that video is supposed to be considered part of the "official" LOST story, or if it was just some fan fiction to get everyone excited at the convention. But that's it. That's the only reason I can think of why Faraday would not be dead.

-Back to Eloise briefly, towards the end of the episode she told Penny that she doesn't know what's going to happen anymore. Is that because the extent of her knowledge of the future was limited to when The Six went back to the island? After that, there is no more past/present interactions, so there is nothing more to know? Or is there more to it than that?

-Daniel is Widmore's kid, too. I know it's been speculated on so much that it's not exactly surprising now that he's admitted it, but I was pretty happy about it since I threw that crazy theory out there after the second episode of the season. So go me. That makes me 1 for 374 on crazy theories thus far.

-Did you notice when Faraday was a kid playing the piano that Eloise had one black earring and one white earring? It's been a while since we've had some good black/white imagery, hasn't it?

-When Faraday went to the Swan and waited for Chang to show up, he commented "right on time". What was that about? How did he know that was going to happen? I guess he must have just watched the season premiere. In all seriousness, though, Faraday knew when Chang was going to show up, knew exactly when the Incident was going to happen, knew exactly what happened to Oceanic 815...but he didn't know that he was going to be shot. How does he find out about this information?

-All the best scientists have mommy issues? Sorry, I'll stop now.

-It was kind of refreshing to see Jack finally have a purpose in his life. He had pretty much been riding the wave, waiting to see where it would take him, but Daniel's return seems to have inspired him to help change the future (Even if he can't). He has a purpose now. Daniel said Eloise was wrong when she told Jack it was his destiny to go back. Given that Jack is about to meet young Eloise, I think she might not be so wrong after all.

-Phil sucks. Always screwing everything up. I feel bad for Sawyer and Juliet, getting caught in the mess Kate & Jack started.

-Looks like the bomb isn't buried inside the Swan after all. The cement was used to contain the massive pocket of energy under the Swan, "like Chernobyl".

-This was totally one of those weeks where I kept making notes about things, and then they would invalidate the note I just made five minutes later. After Faraday had lunch with his mother in his flashback, I made a note to go back and watch the first flashback we saw of Daniel, when he was crying watching the crash, to see if it was Theresa in the house with him. And just like that, we get to see that scene again. Then I made a note when Widmore came to visit him about going to the island, and I wondered if that's what fixed his mind, and then right away Widmore says the island would heal him. Finally, when Hawking was trying to get Daniel to go back to the island, I noted how bothered she was by it and questioned if that meant he was going to die. Well, we know how that one worked out.

-Oh, and it's now super-official that Charles Widmore planted the fake Oceanic 815. It had long been speculated, it was even casually stated during the clip show last week, but now we have it coming from the mouth of Charles Widmore himself. So we can stop hypothesizing that it might have been Ben.

-Richard didn't really look all that worried that Daniel had a gun pointed at him. Do you think that's because Richard's just a bad ass and isn't scared of puny scientists with pistols...or because there's no point in threatening to shoot Richard because it wouldn't do anything anyways?

I have a quasi-prediction/train of thought about something that I wanted to get out there. Faraday's plan was to blow up the Swan/the energy source with the hydrogen bomb that the Others' were supposed to bury. Obviously he didn't get around to doing that. I could see Jack getting behind this idea and trying to make it work himself. But I don't think he can do it in the past, just because he can't change anything. But what if they made it back into the present? The bomb should still be there. The hatch won't be, but that doesn't matter. I'm thinking more in terms of the "war" we're still waiting to see. If that bomb isn't used to destroy the hatch, I could certainly see it playing a significant role in the upcoming battle that we'll (I assume) get to see next season.

Only two more weeks left. I'm hoping for some Hurley flashbacks next week (or at the very least during the finale) so we can find out his story on coming back to the island. Until then, I'm going to go brush up on my Korean and find out what swear word Jin was using when the alarm was going off at the barracks.

  submitted on Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 8:36:00 AM

I have some additional thoughts on last week's episode, and the show in general, so since there's no new episode this week I thought I'd put up a short follow up post.

-First, I would like to thank Anne for her comment regarding being able to exist on the island with your younger self. I responded to her question, but I figured I would go ahead and bring it up in here since not everyone reads the comments on here.

As is the case with man of my theories, this one ultimately turned out to be 100% wrong. Apparently the idea of occupying the same time period as your previous self was not exclusive to when the island was jumping around through time, it also applies in 1977. So that means Daniel was telling the truth when he said Charlotte stopped jumping with them because she died, and that means Miles is able to exist along with his younger self.

That also means that the reason Sun didn't travel back was not because she was already on the island as a child. We still don't know why she didn't, but I guess we have one more theory that we can cross off the list.

Now, one idea I heard on a podcast that has some merit is regarding speculation on what happens if you were to come in contact with your younger self. As of right now, the only person we know of that exists twice in the same time is Miles. We also know that Miles has some extraordinary ability to speak with the dead. I don't know what happens when you come in contact with yourself (I do know that we're not going by Timecop rules where you will simply cease to exist). I had speculated that Miles' abilities might have something to do with "The Incident", but perhaps him coming into contact with himself had something to do with it as well.

-Remember when the island was jumping, and Sawyer and Co. was on that boat, being shot at. I'd say there's a very good chance that Ilana's crew was shooting at them. We saw the boats in the present, plus the Ajira water bottles, it didn't make sense for Ben, Locke, Sun, or Lapidus to be shooting at them, but Ilana, now that we know she has some other purpose?

-Daniel has to be the one who built the pendulum in the Lamp Post. What do we know? We know that the Lamp Post was built in L.A. by Dharma over a pocket of electromagnetic energy. We know, from Eloise Hawking, that a "very clever fellow" added the pendulum to the station to find when and where the island was. We also know that after arriving in 1974, Daniel went...somewhere. After seeing him arrive in the sub at the end of this week's episode, he is apparently a scientist in Dharma, coming to the island from Ann Arbor. Therefore, it is very easy to assume that he built the pendulum at the Lamp Post, and is the "fellow" Hawking was referring to.

Obviously we don't know any of this for sure, but I'd say it's pretty likely at this point.

-So we know that the Others, and the island seem to be wrapped in lots of Egyptian mythology. Lately I have found myself wondering how much about the island Dharma knew when they decided to set up there. The fact that Ben's house (and probably Horace's before that?) in the barracks had a secret door leading to a tunnel filled with hieroglyphics, not to mention that the timer in the Swan changed to some hieroglyphics as well when the button isn't pushed, leads us to believe that they knew something of the island's history. Also, in last week's episode, the chalkboard that Jack was erasing contained some teachings on ancient Egypt:





-What led to Dharma deciding to set up shop on this island? Did they find out about the island from the military? And if so, how did the military find the island, and did they attempt to relocate it once their team and hydrogen bomb went missing? All questions my friend Justin and I were poring over and I would love answers to.

A few things that I thought of during the clipshow last night:

-First, really good clipshow, simply because it was mostly composed of flashforwards and flashbacks, only we got to see them in chronological order for the most part, which was cool.

-I remembered Kate seeing Claire in Aaron's room, but I didn't remember her telling Kate not to take Aaron back to the island. I wonder how much of that played a part in her leaving Aaron with Miss Littleton.

-So these guys that were going after Sayid when he helped Hurley escape from the mental institution, I guess we're to assume that they were part of Ilana's crew? I guess I had initially assumed they were Widmore's men, but our last Sayid flashback showed us that he had killed everyone that posed a threat to them, so why all of a sudden would Widmore have more people go after Sayid? Especially since Widmore knew he was in (Costa Rica?) building houses, and let him be while he was down there. Plus, these guys weren't trying to kill Sayid, they just wanted to capture him.

That being said, why was one of them waiting outside of Hurley's mental institution?

There are lots of blurry lines here with who is working with/for who, and what everyone's motivation is right now.

Everything's set up nicely now for the last three episodes of the season (tear). I expect there to be some major chaos in the Dharma Initiative, and I'm hoping next week will focus on Daniel so we can learn about how he's been spending his time, as well as learning more about how the island works.