Lost is back, it’s good, and bloody as hell.

Oh and, holy SMOKE MONSTER!

I don’t even know where to begin, except for the very beginning where Hurley says to Sawyer during a game of Risk: “Can’t believe you’re just giving him Australia. Australia is the key to the whole game.”

A clue? Probably, but to what? Who the frak knows.

The Beach People

Let’s get the beach out of the way because it was the minor story.

Over on the beach the dead doctor washes up. They finagle a Morse code thingamajig out of the phone and get a response back. Daniel tries to lie about what the response was, but Bernard, that cagey old man, he knows he’s fibbing.

The boat says, “What are you talking about, the doctor is fine?”

Steaming mad, Jack asks Daniel if they ever meant to rescue them.

“No,” comes the reply. Finally, a real answer. Doesn’t make anyone happy though.

On top of it, Jack is sick with some intestinal issue. What’s that about? (I know now thanks to ABC’s horrible previews for next week, which give so much away)

Although we do know his gut says they are getting off the Island. Good guts.

The Attack and Smoke Monster Madness

So the freighter mercenaries are the ones that blew away Karl and Danielle. They capture Alex and force her to turn off the protective grid outside Locke’s camp. But of course she put in a secret code, which rang a phone in Locke’s cabin and repeated “14J.”

They tell Ben, he freaks out and they barricade themselves inside the house with guns galore. Sawyer goes to rescue Claire, and in the meantime watches three random people in succession walk out of their cabin and get blasted.

Despite her house getting blown-up, Claire survives and is brought back by Sawyer to Locke, Ben, Hurley and the baby.

Then things start getting crazy. Miles rings the doorbell (along with the phone, just seemed funny because it’s just so out of place), and brings walkie-talkie to Ben. They have his daughter, so he watches out of the window and tries to tell them she isn’t his. Alex is just a pawn he says. And he’s not coming out.

So Keamy, the leader of the freighter mercenaries, shoots Alex in the back of the head.

Bam. People are dropping like flies.

Ben stares for a few moments (what an awesome face too – see right) at Alex’s dead body and then turns to everyone in the room:

“He changed the rules.”

Who what where? We’ll find out.

Ben rushes quickly into his hidden room, shuts the door and disappears into some ancient doorway in the back of his closet. It’s got markings and stuff all over it.

When he comes out, Ben is covered in dirt. He tells them all to be ready to run towards the tree line when he tells them to. And that they don’t want to be anywhere near the soldiers waiting for them in the trees.

And then comes the greatest Smoke Monster moment of all-time. The house shakes and rumbles, and Ben yells for them to run.

They get outside, and stop, and we see the Smoke Monster come snaking over the houses like a freight train. It dives into the woods and starts killing all the soldiers, snaping trees, and making all kinds of gruesome sounds. All the while there is the same old roller coaster clanking sounds of metal on metal like we’ve heard countless times.

I still want to know how it’s supernatural, but sounds mechanical as well.

He changed the rules. So did Ben. Whatever the rules are, the Smoke Monster wasn’t a part of it before. Now Ben is playing dirty.

They all meet up at the creek, and Sawyer, Claire, Aaron and Miles all leave to go to the beach, choosing not to hang around with the whack jobs.

But Hurley has to stay with Ben and Locke, because he’s the only one who can find the cabin for some odd reason.

And Jacob. They are off to find him to learn their next move. Can’t wait to see what happens with Jacob.

Ben in the Desert, Sayid becomes The Assassin

So the first scene after the opening was a shot of Ben waking up in the middle of the Sahara desert. He does it with a gasp, followed up by vomiting. He’s also wearing a parka and looks to have been shot.

Two men ride up on camels and he proceeds to own them with a telescoping rod weapon in his pocket.

Next we see him in Tunisia, renting a room in a hotel under his Moriarty alias, and while he’s there, Sayid appears on the screen saying he just wants to bury his wife.

Turns out, Nadia was killed by Ishmael Bakir, who works for Charles Widmore.

Ben finds Sayid at the funeral procession and tells him who killed Nadia. They form a little plan and Sayid ends up shooting a load of bullets in Bakir.

And that’s how Sayid became Ben’s henchman. His life is nothing now, and if Ben is after the same guy who had Alex killed, then it’s now Sayid’s war as well.

This all begins in October of 2005, which is very early on in the flash-forwards. The second earliest to be exact according to Lost Pedia.

Ben and Charles

So wow, the meeting at the end of the episode was flat-out awesome. Ben walks into Charles Widmore’s room in the middle of the night and tells him to wake up.

And the amazing thing is…he’s not scared, he knows who Ben is and what Ben is.

Everything that Ben has, he’s taken from Charles. The Island belonged to him before, and it will belong to him again. It’s always been Charles’ Island.

Ben shows up not to kill Charles, but to let him know that he’s going to kill his daughter, Penelope.

Desmond’s Penny.

An eye for an eye. A daughter for a daughter.

Charles shouldn’t have changed the rules, Ben says.

Charles says he’ll never find Penny, and Ben tells him that he wont find the island.

Both are now on a hunt. The Shape of Things to Come?

Questions

Okay, first off, what are the rules?

Secondly, my theory is starting to come true. At least, some of it. I thought early on that Charles has been trying to find the Island because Ben took it away, or cut off communications somehow. And now that’s sort of being proven true. It’s always been Charles’ Island. But he lost it somehow, because Ben took it over and “hid” it from Widmore’s eyes.

How does Ben land in the Sahara like that wearing a parka and having been shot? Was he in a cold climate before? Was he on the Island?

Is Ben traveling like Desmond did? It doesn’t seem to, because otherwise Ben’s other half would have just been sitting in the Sahara Desert waiting to wake up, so that doesn’t make sense. But how did he get there?

So Ben is either controlling the Smoke Monster, or knows how to control it when he wants. Obviously he told it exactly where to go.

Or perhaps the Smoke Monster isn’t being ordered around, maybe it’s more like a watchdog on a lease, and Ben set it free? And why is Ben all dirty? Where did that tunnel go?

What did you think of the episode? What questions do you have, or theories?

The Honolulu Advisor posted the entire scoop, so I will try to paraphrase the detailed story as best I can, but be warned, there are major spoilers ahead.

According to these writers, Lindelof said that the Island is really a large, always moving land mass, invisible from outside detection. It’s unable to be seen from space, or from earth, unless one knows the correct location and path in order to reach it.

“Uhhh, it’s really simple actually. The Island represents the Garden of Eden, the mythical location of the beginning of human life,” said Lindelof. “But when man was banished from the Garden, God removed the Island from the mainland, and cast it out into the ocean, to float freely around the Earth, invisible to human eyes.”

Did God mean to leave us a way to find it again, the opening being a way to return home? Lindelof shrugged at this, and said that was up to us to interpret.

All he knows is that there is a way to it and man had found it. And not just by Dharma, but by a people long ago. Lindleof continued:

“These travelers were looking for a new home, and somehow stumbled upon the path to the Island. They landed there, knew it was holy ground, built a Temple and massive monuments to represent themselves and God.

“You remember the four-toed statue right?”

At this point in the conversation, Damon started rambling, and said the smoke monster is really the serpent from the Garden of Eden, who caused man to sin.

“That’s why it killed Eko…he saw what it truly was and the serpent wouldn’t allow it.”

There is much, much more to the story, and you can finish it all at the Advisor, so I’m going to skip to the end.

Damon says that the Oceanic 6 (including Aaron, Kate cannot leave him behind) will return to the Island after Ben secures a submarine for the journey. The Freighter people had killed off most of the survivors of 815, but a few of them fled to the Temple and joined The Others there. Locke, Claire and Juliette remain alive.

When they arrive, they hear loud rumblings coming from the direction of the Temple, and as they make their way there, they find Jacob (garbed in armor) and the Smoke Monster in the midst of spiritual warfare, while Locke and the Others are in an all-out battle against the Freighter people.

The Smoke Monster, or serpent, gets the best of Jacob, pinning him down and getting ready to destroy him, when Aaron walks over, snatches the snake by the tail and flings it into the depths of the Temple, utterly ridding it from this living world.

Jack and the Oceanic 6 arrive just in time to help defeat the Freighter people, but not without losses, as Juliette and Ben both die of mortal wounds.

With the enemy defeated, Aaron stands up, suddenly wise and talking, and proclaims that man has returned to the Garden of Eden, and here they will create a new world. You find out almost prior to this that Aaron was conceived without Claire ever having been with a man.

And some other secrets will be answers. The coffin actually holds Vincent, the dog (which explains why no one really cared to come to the funeral, although Jack seemed a bit too distraught over a stupid animal) and the two skeletons in the cave from season one are actually Adam and Eve.

Lindelof ended his drunken rambling by adding:

“Oh yeah, April Fools day.”

(like you didn’t already know)

By the way, Jacob is Luke Skywalker’s father.

The writers on Lost love to leave us hanging. I have no clue if this was a planned cliffhanger or not, but because of the writer’s strike, this episode was the last of the original eight produced. Did they know in the back of their minds that the strike would happen and thus created an episode that would keep us in suspense until the show returned?

Either way, it was good and gave us a few answers. The downside is, as Lost is fond of doing, we now have more questions.

Recap of Lost episode 4×08, “Meet Kevin Johnson”

After some great flashbacks of Michael and Walt’s journey on the Island (I absolutely LOVED the scene in season 1 when Tom takes Walt. “We’re gonna have to take the boy.” That was so chilling.) we drop into a townhall meeting in one of the cabins at John Locke City.

In the spirit of truth and honestly, Locke wants to get everything out in the open. So he brings Ben along, brings Miles and the entire camp is there to learn the truth.

We basically learn once again (thanks Hurley for pointing that out) that the freighter is there to nab Benjamin Linus. But what we find out after that, with no disagreement from Miles, is that once they have Ben, they’ll kill everyone else.

Truth hurts.

Then they tell everyone that Michael is the guy on the boat, and sometimes I think it’s easy for us fans to forget how much everyone hates Michael now after what he did. We may be excited to see him again, but certainly no one else is.

As Locke takes Miles back to his cell, Sawyer catches up and points out that Locke failed to be honest about the $3.2 million that Miles asked for from Ben.

Locke jokes that there aren’t any banks on the island, so it wasn’t important. Miles…laughs right back and points out that Ben has gone from prisoner to a free man.

He’s a man that can get what he wants. A lesson that no one ever seems to learn.

Case in point: Ben persuades Danielle, Alex and Karl to go to the Temple for safety, pointing out that if the freighter crew finds out Alex is his daughter, they’ll use her to get to him.

I think I’d take my chances, honestly. They agree to it though…a bit too quick for my tastes.

The Kevin Johnson or Michael Dawson backstory

We come onto the captain beating the crap out of a crew member who appeared to be trying to launch a motorboat into the ocean.

He’s doing it to save their lives he says. Do they remember what happened to Minkowski?

Interesting…

Meanwhile, Sayid and Desmond confront Michael, asking him why he’s there. (by the way, I’d like to thank Desmond for his non-participation in tonight’s episode. I don’t think he had but two lines)

“I’m here to die,” says Michael.

Flashback time

We flashback to Manhattan, New York, where Michael is living now and apparently trying to kill himself. But he can’t. He tries to drive headfirst into a shipping container going around 70+mph, and doesn’t die.

He awakes in a hospital and sees…LIBBY! But it’s a dream, he screams and the real doctor walks in.

When he leaves the hospital, he goes to see Walt. But as we learn from Michael’s mother, that aint happening. Michael had shown up out of nowhere, tells his mother that she can’t tell anyone they are alive and she’s not happy with that.

Walt is upset at Michael anyways, which we find out later is because Michael told Walt what he did to Libby and Ana Lucia.

Michael tries a second time to kill himself, this time with a gun he buys after pawning his watch that Jin gave him. But before he can do it, frakking TOM shows up out of nowhere. You know Tom of course. He’s an Other and dead now.

I guess it’s nice for Tom that before he bit it on the island, he got a little food, a little wine and a little sex in a Manhattan penthouse.

Tom tells Michael that he can’t kill himself, that the Island wont let him. He still had work to do. Tom prods Michael to test it for himself if he wants. So back in his apartment, he attempts to pull the trigger on the gun and nothing happens.

Just a click. He goes to try one more time but before he can pull the trigger, he sees the news about Oceanic 815 being found at the bottom of the ocean.

Michael goes to find Tom in his penthouse suite at the Carl, and asks him about Oceanic 815. It’s not the real plane Tom says, and blames the whole thing on Widmore, showing pictures of empty graves and purchase orders.

So last week the captain says Ben did it, this week Tom says Widmore did.

Who do we believe?

Tom gives Michael a mission to redeem himself in his son’s eyes: Go spy on the freighter and kill everyone on board under the alias Kevin Johnson and save everyone on the Island.

Once again comes the theme of redemption. The Island wants you to redeem yourself.

Michael goes on board, meets a few people (Miles somehow knows his real name isn’t Kevin) and opens a crate that was shipped to him. It has a bomb in it…yowsers.

Michael is struggling…he can’t kill all these innocent people. But then he sees a bunch of guys doing target practice on the deck with some pretty serious machine guns. He realizes that what Tom told him is true.

He goes to set off the bomb and out of nowhere, we see Libby again, who says “Don’t do it Michael.”

Where is Libby coming from? Is she from the Island, like Harper from two weeks ago? Or is she just a figment of his imagination?

He ignores her and hits the execute button. Nothing happens except a little flag pops up telling him “not yet.”

WTF?

Ben then contacts him via the ship’s radio and tells him to gather a list of names and to disable the radio, followed by the engines. He tells him the fake bomb was to show him that he’s not cruel like Widmore is.

Mind games, mind games, mind games.

Back to the Present

Now we’re back in the present and Sayid isn’t happy. He drags Michael into the captain’s quarters and proclaims that he’s the traitor.

And that scene ends in a cliffhanger for April 24th. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the captain was surprised at all. We’ll find out.

We bounce back to Danielle, Alex and Karl, making their way to the Temple. Karl says some nice words to Alex, about wanting to protect her just like Ben.

At that moment, I said to my wife, “Well, Karl’s dead.”

Zing! Zing! Zing! Shots ring out and Karl is hit through the heart it appeared. He falls over dead. Stone dead.

I totally enjoyed this scene by the way…there is nothing cooler I think than hearing the impact of bullets without the sound of the gun going off.

Danielle and Alex jump behind a tree, and Danielle gets Alex ready to make a run for it.

But ZING! Danielle gets hit too as they take off, and she falls to the ground. Alex stands up and yells “I’m Ben’s daughter, don’t shoot me!”

Ben always wins.

Are they both really dead?

Answers and Questions

So we found out how Michael got on the ship. It’s hard to believe this timeline on occasion, because according to Lostpedia, it’s only been around 30 days since Michael left the Island on the boat, but suddenly he’s back. Talk about a quick turnaround.

I sort of feel like we should believe that the fake wreckage is really Charles Widmore’s doing, but I’m still undecided.

We also kind of are reassured that the freighter is there to kill everyone once Ben is captured.

The Island has power outside the Island itself, as it was able to stop Michael from blowing his own head off. How and why?

So one interesting tidbit is that Michael lived in Manhattan and the dead guy in the coffin is from there as well. Hmmmmmmm….

What happens when people leave the boat? Apparently, Minkowski tried and that’s how he ended up like he was.

On a side note, the previews for April 24th showed that indeed Aaron is considered one of the Oceanic 6.

Is Libby being used, or was she just in Michael’s head? I think she’s being used by the Island.

The song playing when Michael tried to kill himself at the beginning was It’s Getting Better by Mama Cass Elliot. Gotta love the oldies that play in the background of some of the creepier scenes in Lost.

And speaking of that song, when Libby appears the second time…that song is playing again and I SWEAR in the background you can hear that little wail/horn sound that the smoke monster makes when it appears.

So what did I miss? What did you think of the episode?

Something amazing about the Island is that people sometimes die and sometimes don’t. The Cyclops dude was shot through the heart in the season finale, but was able to come back and blow the Looking Glass up and thus killing Charlie in the process.

Not to mention John Locke being shot by Ben and then not dying. Walt said he had work to do.

And then Naomi is stabbed in the back and of course comes back to do something. Is it related? Does the Island make some people come back to life in order to fulfill missions? I doubt it, but it’s something to think about.

It makes me wonder if Charlie will ever been seen again (not as a ghost that is)…of course, we’ve lost a lot of other people along the way like Boone and his sister, and I doubt they come back.

Alright, on to the show.

Hurley Flash Forward

Sadly I had the opening ruined for me because the article I posted on Thursday mentioned some things you needed to know for the season 4 premiere, and one of those was the Camaro we see at the beginning belonging to Hurley.

He’s in a high speed chase, running from something he saw in a convenient store. He crashes, goes to an interrogation room to meet a cop who was partners with now dead Ana Lucia. Hurley pretends he never heard of her.

It was a great opening, with Jack watching the chase on TV and cursing to himself. This must be prior to Jack’s beard growing, highly “medicated” days. In fact we find out later that Jack wants to hide himself from the public and is thinking of growing a beard.

Naomi lives!

So Naomi goes missing and Kate steals the satellite phone from Jack because she knows the blood trail left was a fake. Jack, goes with Rousseau and Ben along the fake path, but Kate ends up finding Naomi.

The supposed girl from Penny’s boat reprograms the phone so that the guy on the freighter can track it better, and then she “dies” again. This time though, I think she’s really dead.

Desmond Returns

Meanwhile on the beach, Desmond comes back without Charlie and tells those on the beach about the fact that this boat does NOT belong to Penny and Naomi is lying. Sawyer immediately wants to radio Jack, but Sayid says the radio is likely monitored by the boat, so Hurley takes it and chucks it out into the ocean.

They decide to take off to find Jack and warn them that way.

Hurley finds Jacob and Locke!

So along the way, Hurley’s big frame slows him down and he finds himself lost, and instead of Sawyer and the others, he finds Jacob’s cabin. Of course, he has no clue what it is.

He looks inside and sees a man in a rocking chair and then Locke’s big stinking eye fills the screen and scares the crap out of everyone. Hurley runs off and is now in some kind of weird universe where all he can find is the cabin.

(update: Check out the screen capture of this scene, it clearly shows that Jacob is Christian)

And then Locke finds him.

Who is Jacob?

Well, before the episode started, my wife and I debated about Jacob being Jack’s father Christian, only because of Adam’s blog post suggesting it.

We both said no way, that is was just another illusion. Ummm, were we wrong and Adam right?

The thing is, the last Missing Pieces episode shows Christian with white sneakers, and Jacob was wearing them and from the look we got of him, most CERTAINLY could pass for Jack’s father.

I don’t think he looked like that last year, so is it a change in the plot by the writers or does Jacob not really have a set form?

I still don’t think it’s Christian, it just makes no sense to me.

Two Sides

All the groups meet up…Locke and Hurley find Sawyer and the beach group, then Jack shows up with his crew.

What a great turn we see in Jack. In the last episode, he let Ben supposedly kill Sayid, Bernard and Jin, and then beats the snot out of Ben. Next this week he informs Kate that if Locke shows up, he’s going to kill him.

Then he sees Locke and gives him a right hook and yanks Locke’s gun from his belt, pointing it at his face.

Locke looks at Jack, “You wont shoot me Jack, just like I wouldn’t have shot you…”

CLICK. Jack pulls the trigger. No bullets.

Wow. So much for that, huh Locke?

After the groups pull them apart, Locke tells everyone he’s going to the Others’ barracks, that the people coming to rescue them will kill them all. Hurley backs him up with Charlie’s tale of “Not Penny’s Boat.”

People start joining Locke’s squad, including Claire, Sawyer, Hurley, Rousseau, Alex, Carl and Ben. For a hilarious moment in an otherwise dark episode, Ben says, “Jack, with your permission, I’d like to go with John.”

The rest stay with Jack and Kate as the helicopter drops a guy in a parachute, who lands, sees them both and asks him “Are you Jack?”

The big secret

So we get now that what was eating at Jack in season 3, and now what’s causing Hurley to lose his mind is that the Oceanic 6, those that returned from the Island to the mainland, lied about who was left behind.

In fact, I think they told them there were no other survivors. A big lie. No wonder Hurley is going crazy.

So much so, he sees Charlie while at the mental institution he basically begged to be let into. Charlie tells him that he’s hiding, and that “They need you…they need you….THEY NEED YOU!”

The real mystery now lies in the fact that if Hurley went with Locke, why the heck was he one of the Oceanic 6?

What happens between the arrival of the “rescuers” and the splitting of the survivors? I feel like we have a lot to happen yet before Jack, Kate, Hurley and the three others actually leave the island.

Final Thoughts

My wife had an interesting theory about these people trying to find the island with Naomi. Perhaps they are in fact Dharma people trying to find the island.

This is what we both think:

The big Purge happened where Ben killed everyone. But they pretend that Dharma is still alive on the Island, so they still get those drop shipments from the mainland and other communications.

But somehow Dharma finds out that the Others now have control so Ben shuts off communications from the outside world via the Looking Glass and now Dharma can’t find the Island. So the people on the boat could be the Dharma initiative trying to get back.

Yet without the communications, perhaps they can’t find the Island? We already know it’s REALLY hard to get there, so maybe there is NO WAY unless you can communicate with it?

Either that, or it’s another group that has somehow found out about it and is trying to find it for their own purposes.

What do you think?

So what did you think? What the heck is going on? Who are these people?

And do you think the Island makes Charlie appear to Hurley, or is it his own sub-conscious?

(Also make sure you check out the screen capture of the scene with Jacob in the cabin, it clearly shows that Jacob is Christian)