LOST: This Place is Death

Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
-Henry David Thoreau

Welcome back Smokey, aka, 'security system guarding the temple.' We know now that you were for sure around and messing with people in 1988, and considering your hieroglyphic-covered ancient lair, it seems you've been around a lot longer than that. (Hieroglyphics matching the ones in the button-pushing hatch?) So Smokey can inhabit people and affect their personalities, or, if you make physical contact with Smokey it messes you up? Still trying to understand the 'sickness' that happened to Danielle's people. Did anything change for/about Danielle since Jin was there this time around to stop her from following the others into Smokey's lair? Or, do we presume with time travel that, though it had not happened for Jin yet, it had already happened that way for Danielle?Nice with the arm getting yanked off- very Jurassic Park. Poor crazy prego Danielle- can't really blame the woman for losing it a little bit and going all Rambo. Interesting to watch things play out just as she had explained it to our Losties a few seasons ago. Also, Danielle gave birth to Alex on the island- this was post-Dharma but pre-Castaways. When exactly did the baby problem start?

Jin and Sawyer. Reunited and it feels so good. I totally forgot that Charlotte spoke Korean. (I wish that her knowledge of the Klingon language would have come into play at some point ... maybe she can be in JJ Abrams new Star Trek movie ;P) "Don't let them bring her back, this place is death.' ... so, was that supposed to be some kind of prophesy or was Charlotte just PO'd about all the jumping and nose bleeds? Oh, I love crazy Charlotte! "Look for the well" - so her subconscious is starting to remember her time on the island. The well at the pre-Orchid Station location though, wouldn't it have been pre-Charlotte too? Whoa! Charlotte remembers Dan. Is he actually Jacob? Daniel is the most confusing character. If he IS Jacob, or whatever connection it is that he has with the island, I really don't think that he realizes (or remembers) it fully. Why did Charlotte have to kick the bucket just when she was getting interesting? They always do that on LOST- make you care for/understand/relate to characters just in time to kill them off (Boone, Shannon, Charlie...) PS, is Jin the only one NOT having nosebleeds at this point? (Besides Dan who has a Constant).

I was glad that they had that scene with Jin and Locke at the well because I had been wondering why Locke didn't tell Sun about Jin since 'Jeremy Bentham' visited them all. Ouch, you're knee Locke! So I guess, dead, creepy Christian Shepherd really can't physically touch people in the undead state he is in. Nice reveal with the whole, Locke was supposed to move the wheel and not Ben- is that true or just a little tidbit to make sure that Locke feels guilty/faithful enough to sacrifice his life for everyone and the island even though he really doesn't know why he is doing it? Did Ben know that things would go awry if he turned the wheel and not Locke and that was his plan the whole time so that he could get back to the island as its savior? Also, not that Locke has turned the wheel how will that effect the time jumps on the island? Obviously it won't solve things since the big thing is getting everyone back, but it must have some effect.

Well that was a quick sail for Desmond to LA from the UK. How creepy is Eloise? Interesting that it seemed like Ben hadn't made the connection with who she was until Des said he was looking for Dan's mom- he realized something in that moment. Perhaps a Whidmore connection? I was waiting for two things that we will hopefully get next week: 1- a shocked look on Desmond's face when he recognizes Ellie, 2- Ben asking Desmond about Penny. So I guess that Sun is on board now- is she going to go and get her super cute kid first? Maybe Des can sail her to Korea in a day in his super fast jetboat. I guess that's not fair, since we don't know 'when' exactly it was that Des was at Oxford compared to the last couple of 'real time' days with Ben trying to gather everyone. Now to very quickly get Kate and Sayid and Hurley on board, which the preview for next week seems to suggest they are able to do. It was a couple of episodes ago that Ellie told Ben he had like 70 hours to get them back to the island- what are we down to now? (Also, what exactly has he had to do to keep them all safe? It seems to me that most of the off-island trouble that they have had is more DUE to him in some way)

I'm still stuck on the Charles Whidmore and Eloise Hawking relationship. They were 'Others' on the island together when they were young, and they both seem to have left (or been expulsed) from the island around the same time, early enough that their respective children didn't grow up there. Is Ben's annihilation of the Dharma folks what caused the problems and made them have to leave? Is that why everything Ben has was 'taken' from Charles? Also, is there a love connection between Charles and Ellie? Or, are they siblings? Maybe as opposed to Daniel and Penny being brother and sister, they are cousins. I would like to learn about Daniel's father and Penny's mother. I would also like to hear about Charlotte's parentage- at least one of her parents must be someone we've met before. Could it be Ben and his childhood sweetheart Annie? Maybe when Annie realized that Ben had totally lost it and was going to kill everyone, she fled with their child to England. I wonder if we will see Charlotte as a phantom figure at some point like Christian. The whole Dan in love with Red still throws me off- he has always been extremely overprotective of her, (and maybe its just the lack of chemistry that was throwing me off) but I just don't think he is sincerely interested in a romantic sense. I wonder if they'll drop that love business now. The likeliest scenario for him to be the 'crazy man' who told her not to come back is that it is during a jump that hasn't happened so he doesn't remember it yet. It already happened for her, but not for him. (Like with the Danielle/Jin thing) His warning her as a child would have been the same time period to match that scene from the first episode where he is with Dharma in the cave. Still, the first time we saw Dan he was in a home, seemingly being cared for by a nurse, and bawling about the crash of Oceanic 815, though he didn't know why. Is his memory of time on the island before all jacked up?

Also, I have replayed a scene from last week in my mind, and it is bothering me. The scene when Locke it talking to Sawyer in reference to Kate and says, 'don't you want her to come back?' I know that Sawyer is very broken down after everything, but does he believe in the island now too? I mean, why didn't he give Locke a quizzical look and say what do you mean, back? Why aren't we still trying to get off the island? I know they are travelling through time and all, but have they given up on the dream of leaving the island and going back to real life? Seems a little off. I'm glad that Jin made an issue of it tonight with not wanting Sun to return, but Sawyer and Juliette and Miles and Dan are just kind of going with Locke, despite no good explanation. Juliette is particularly zen- what knowledge of hers do we still not know from her time with the Others?


Other Thoughts:

Now I know that Annie (Ben's childhood love) was seemingly American, but what if she is Charlotte's mother? She could have moved to England to follow Charles Widmore. Maybe Ben isn't upset about Annie dying, but she chose to leave the island, which to him, would have been worse that her dying. This could be more than a battle over the island, but a vendetta over a woman.It needs to be reiterated that Locke is currently in a coffin. He is supposedly coming back to the island in a coffin. Hmmm. Who else came to the island in a coffin? Oh yeah, Christian Shephard did. That is an intriguing parallel. If the island has some power to "reincarnate" like we all suspect it may, then we may not be seeing some strictly ghost Christian.

So is the well Locke jumped into really JACOB's Well? Jacob's Well – the one in the Bible – is now located on the grounds of a monastery. To get to the well, you have to enter a church, descend the stairs to a crypt where the well stands, along with icons and lots of lit candles.Doesn't that setting sound familiar? In the episode "Numbers", Hurley goes to visit his old friend Leonard whom Hurley got the numbers from. Leonard tells him to visit a man named Sam Toomey but it turns out that Sam is dead. Sam's wife tells Hurley that when Sam was stationed at a military listening post 16 years ago, he picked up a voice repeating the numbers over and over again. This was in the South Pacific. This was the voice that Daneille and the French people heard - The same one that Sam Toomey heard.

Now we know for sure Charlotte's link to C.S. Lewis. The character most like C.S. Lewis in the Narnia books is the professor, who owns the wardrobe that acts as a passageway to a strange land where time moves differently. But then it's revealed in a later book that the professor himself LIVED in Narnia as a YOUNG boy. Just like our Charlotte. And in both cases, the former inhabitants were told by those around them that they had made up the magical lands in their heads.

I think it's really interesting that Jin hasn't had a nose bleed yet - and Sawyer has. Maybe being knocked out for the first round of jumps- saved him from the damage of the temporal displacement. His brain didn't have to process the time differentials while he was out. Maybe...??

Remember way back when Kate, Sawyer, and Jack were being held hostage. Sawyer is busting up rocks and Juliette says they're building a "runway". She jokes that this is for "the aliens" and eventually confesses to not being sure of the runway's purpose. With all this Ajira Airlines business, maybe the runway is for a plane carrying the Oceanic 6 back to the island. Which would mean they had this planned way back when. Awesome, if that's the case. If Ajira Airlines is how the 6 get back on the island, that means the Ajira bottle in the boat belonged to one of them, which means that scene was in the future -the future Oceanic 6 leaves the beach for a minute, finds one of their boats missing, and chases after whoever took it. Which I think means Sawyer & friends were being shot at by Jack & friends. (Oooh, I like it)

Last season, in the episode ''Meet Kevin Johnson,'' Lost cited a book that may help explain many of our time travel questions. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the hero becomes ''unstuck in time'' and begins experiencing past, present, and future all at once. Perhaps Lost is dramatizing a similar conceit: The Left Behinders have become ''unstuck'' and are now experiencing the Island's past, present, and future in an everlasting state of now.

Alpert knows when the castaways are. He told Locke the "next" time they met he wouldn't recognize him. Not "when we meet again" but the *next* time. This mean he knew exactly when Locke et al. were leaping to. But how does he know?

so the only ones skipping through time are those who were either on the island or on the freighter when Ben turned the wheel. Are these left-behinders skipping through time evenly? For example, are Jin and Locke, though physically apart, skipping at the same moment and to the same time? I'd like to know what happened to Rose, Bernard, and the other dwindling nameless 815 survivors that were supposed to meet up at the creek. I know the show can't use them all of the time, but it bugs me that they left them hanging like that. More importantly though, what about Cindy the Stewardess and the two kids from 815 that were in the Others camp? Are they jumping as well? If not, why not?

In the world of science, there is a theoretical concept called zero point energy/zero point field, which could help explain much of what we're seeing on Lost. Zero point energy is a hypothetical source of possibly limitless energy. It is linked to ''The Casmir Effect'' and ''negative energy,'' terms name checked by Pierre Chang in his Orchid orientation videos. They are also key ingredients in the wormhole theory of time travel.
Why can't the Island be the one time traveling *under* the lostaways? In other words, the lostaways are in the same timeline as the Oceanic Six, but the Island is unstuck in time and changing to different time periods around the lostaways. I suppose that would make the Others part of the Island.