Well, now.

Well.

I didn’t take many notes as the show aired — compared to last week’s “Happily Ever After,” this was a relatively uncomplicated, straightforward episode in which characters move, the plot moves, and no new mysteries or questions crop up. In that, it was highly satisfying. There were still a few things I could’ve done without — the explanation for the whispers is one of them — but I’ll get to that in a sec.

Hurley has been the most lovable character throughout Lost’s run for a number of reasons. He’s the kid who always gets picked on, the kid who never gets chosen for big adventure, the kid who gets beaten down time after time but still believes that people should be treated with respect. Plus, he’s a sci fi nerd. He is The Underdog, and everybody loves The Underdog. It is profoundly satisfying to watch Sideways Hurley because he’s living the Underdog Makes Good narrative. He’s preternaturally lucky and supremely successful, and he’s also still essentially Hurley, believing that everyone deserves compassion and respect. Hurley the Humanitarian. Look what happens when a boatload of money falls into the right hands.

There’s a theory floating around the Lostverse that describes the Sideways Universe as a world in which all of the characters get what they most wanted in the Real Universe, though it comes at a price. I’m having a hard time applying it to Hurley. Actually, I’m having a hard time applying it to most of the characters, based on what we’ve seen of their Sideways existences. It’s easy with Locke — he gets Helen, though he’s still in a wheelchair. (Possibly he gets Helen AND his father’s acceptance.) Desmond gets Widmore’s approval, but not Penny. Sun and Jin get to be together, but Sun gets shot (endangering their unborn child). Sayid gets to be with the woman he loves, but not really. No idea how this theory applies to Kate, Claire, Sawyer, and Jack, and with Hurley . . . all I can think is that the lottery money isn’t cursed, but then it never was. He was never in a mental institution in the Sideways world, so maybe his most urgent desire was to not be paranoid and delusional. Anyway. This is mostly a sidenote that got out of hand. Back to the episode.

Libby! About damn time. Hurley placing a fresh flower on Libby’s grave tugged at my heartstrings; seeing her again after all these years was immensely satisfying. Libby’s ability to remember the Real Universe, and Hurley’s flashes of it during their first kiss (again with the heartstring tugging), means that there’s at least two more ways to break through the Sideways Universe, aside from having a near-death experience. Granted, Libby’s mental state and her ability to see the Real Universe is kind of a chicken-egg situation, and I’m not sure which came first. However, she was in Santa Rosa in the Real World as well, and I can’t help but think back to Season 2′s “Dave,” which ends on that shot of Libby in the Santa Rosa rec room, staring intently and rather madly at Hurley.

Do you think Libby knows what’s going on here? That’s my question. I like the idea that she does. It’s reminds me of the way all the Glory-fied crazy people in Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Season 4 know what Dawn really is.

It was equally satisfying, as it has been all season, to watch Island Hurley come into his own. He’s had the occasional Moment before, but he’s carrying himself now with such quiet purpose and strength that he’s almost a different person from even the Hurley in “The Lighthouse.” And yet, he’s still essentially Hurley. He can’t keep the truth about not seeing Jacob from Jack. And that conversation, where Jack says that he’s pretty much OK now with following someone else, that was a nice moment. In my notes, I have it as “Jack learns an Important Lesson. Finally!”

I wasn’t expecting to see Michael again, but I did like how he appeared just after Hurley chides Libby for being the one dead person he hasn’t talked to, as though the island is taking the piss. “We’re not going to give you Libby, but here’s her killer. Psych!”

What I didn’t like? The explanation for the whispers. The idea that the Island is purgatory for souls who can’t move on is so unsatisfying for reasons I can’t fully articulate but should be obvious enough that I don’t need to. And maybe that’s not really what it is, purgatory. Maybe “moving on” means something other than “to Heaven.” What I’m hung up on is why Michael’s even there. I thought he’d fulfilled his duty to the island or whatever at the end of Season 4, on the freighter. Just before all that C4 blows up, Christian Shepherd appears to him and says, “You can go now.” Was it another “Psych! Just kidding. We’re going to need you to do this one other thing, but then I promise you can go” situation? Man, the Island is an asshole.

But I did like the knockout rolled-out ending. All of our original castaways, save Jin, are together. Finally! The look between Jack and Smokey was deliciously drawn out and intense. I wonder whether Jack will point out to everyone else there that Sayid is not really Sayid anymore. I don’t think that Kate or Sawyer have cottoned to this yet. (Speaking of Sawyer, I’m a little disgruntled that he hasn’t been doing much of anything other than confronting Smokey with things that Smokey has done. “So you went for a walk, huh?” Enough of that.)

That Smokey was going to toss Desmond down the well was telegraphed from the minute we saw the well, but did Desmond know that was going to happen? I’m thinking he did, because I’m still working with the idea that the latest EMP he experienced gave him the ability to see the entire picture of what was and what needs to be. Because he’s still so very ZEN about all the crap going on.

And if I’m not mistaken that’s the donkey wheel well, right? Although Smokey did mention that there were other wells all over the island and so maybe he tossed Des down a different one. That this happened in tandem with Sideways Des RUNNING OVER LOCKE was nothing short of super fantastic. Locke’s face, as he’s lying on the ground watching the Real Universe flash before his eyes, looked very much like his face after he was pushed out of the window, so that’s interesting even though I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.

Other observations:

• So long, Ilana. I think you deserved something a little more dignified than going the way of the Arzt, and I hope we still get the backstory on how you became a Jacob disciple (Jacobite? Ha), though I guess that’s not likely, what with 5 episodes left.
• Small moment, but one I loved: Ben following Richard.
• Also loved Ben confronting Des, on the suspicion that Des is a pedophile stalking his next victim. LOVED that Des says he has a child named Charlie — subtle indication that he’s fully conscious of both his existences.
• Finally, the mysterious island boy! We’re agreed that he’s the same boy that Smokey saw earlier in the season, the one who warns, “You can’t kill them,” only older, right? Are we still agreed on the premise that this is Jacob? So now we’ve seen kid Jacob and pre-teen Jacob, yes?

Jacob’s a phoenix.

I’m only half-joking.

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Why are Desmond episodes so good? It’s partly because Henry Ian Cusick is just so good, so fun to watch, but it’s also because Des eps always have to do with the timey-wimey stuff, the scientific explanations for why the island is like it is, its powers and limitations. It’s the same reason the Locke and Ben episodes are always so good — Locke eps always have the spiritual element of the island at their core, while Ben eps tend to focus on the island’s history. These three are like the Island Trinity.

This episode was like “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and “The Constant” swirled together in a delicious Desmond cone. My notes are all exclamation points. “Minkowski!” “Driveshaft!” “Daniel alive! Musician!” “NOT PENNY’S BOAT!” “MILTON!”

Now that I think about it, this entire episode was really little more than a string of callbacks and references to previous episodes, back to back to back. And it was FANTASTIC.

Minkowski: not a mathematician, but a driver for Widmore, kinda skeezy, but thankfully questioning Desmond on his request for the 815 flight manifest. Good on Minkowski, for actually asking a pertinent question! Good on Desmond, for answering it! Except he doesn’t really, but still. Also, does Des say “I need to show THEM something,” or “show HIM something”? Where him = Widmore, but them = everyone on that flight? I would assume that the manifest would somehow prove that the Sideways world isn’t real, but how? (Maybe them = the Widmores?)

We also saw the return of animal testing (boo!) with the white rabbit named Angstrom. (Ha! I really got a kick out of that.)

Widmore has a large painting of the scales of justice in his office, recalling the scales in the cave.

That Widmore and Desmond are all buddy-buddy parallels the way everyone’s father seems to be pretty decent in the Sideways world. My throat caught a little when Widmore brought out the bottle of MacCutcheon (best fake scotch ever! Every time I see it referenced my mind goes to Kramer’s Hennigan’s commercial).

Widmore and Eloise Hawking are married. Daniel is a musician. And I have to wonder whether Eloise deliberately steered him into music, the same way she had deliberately steered him into physics. It was pretty clear that Eloise knows exactly what’s going on — telling Desmond he’s “not ready” to meet Penny.

I am probably one of about five people who was happy to hear “You All Everybody” again. Sorry, but that song has always cracked me up. And Driveshaft being still together explains Liam’s presence at the jail however many episodes ago.

Desmond sees his own reflection a couple times, in the arrivals board at LAX and in the door to the jail just before Charlie walks out of it.

I know I’m a big ol’ sap, but I was surely not the only one who got chills when Charlie does his “Not Penny’s boat” gesture in the sinking car. CHILLS. Coming as it did after all the layers of Desmond and Charlie’s relationship were referenced — Desmond is charged with babysitting Charlie, the two of them talk about love and choice — to have the pivotal drowning scene from the end of Season 3 repeated was powerful.

Desmond experiences more flashes before his eyes, all about Penny, as he goes into the MRI chamber. At that moment I thought that everyone was going to converge on the hospital and Doctor Who would show up and sonic screwdriver the MRI machine into something hugely powerful and that’s how everything gets OK.

Oh, Eloise’s LOOK when she meets Desmond. Fantastic. And then she echoes Faraday in saying “What happened, happened.” Also fantastic. She knows. She knows! (How?) (Nah, don’t care. She’s always known.)

Penny’s last name is Milton. OF COURSE. You could ask how this last name came about, why it’s Milton and not Widmore, and I’d answer that I never understood why Daniel’s last name was Faraday, unless it was to shield him from knowing that Widmore was his father. So my guess is that Sideways Penny doesn’t know that Widmore is her father, and this was done to prevent Desmond from meeting her before it was time. Daniel knows because his two worlds are bleeding into each other.

Oh my stars was it nice to see Jeremy Davies again. Damn, I missed him. And his description of seeing Charlotte in the museum and just knowing that he already loved her — so sweet! And HELLO now the look Jack gave Kate in the first episode makes sense.

I’m also not one to roll my eyes at the idea that love is going to be The Answer to Everything at the end in some sort of Harry Potter way. I don’t think this is where they’re going with this, but capital-L Love has ALWAYS been a major part/theme of this show: Desmond/Penny, Jin/Sun, Charlie/Claire, Rose/Bernard! — let’s also include Daniel/Charlotte now and Jack/Kate and Sawyer/Juliet (please?).

(Sidenote: how come it’s just the guys who have these love at first sight flashes?)

My take is that seeing Charlotte was a trigger for Daniel’s real-time consciousness to seep into his Sideways consciousness (true love’ll do that sometimes, make you dream in quantum mechanics and stuff), so he drew this graph and equation without really understanding them. I caught the words “real space” and “imaginary time.” The Sideways world isn’t real. I mean, duh, but I’m glad we got confirmation on that, and I think it’s more than “it’s not real.” Another theory floating around was that this was how things would turn out if Jacob hadn’t touched any of the candidates, but that’s no longer valid. Jughead wasn’t a giant reset button, it was something else altogether. This world simply isn’t meant to be. It’s imaginary.

And again, Daniel and his mother are approaching things in different ways — Eloise seems to be adhering to a very rigid set of circumstances that must happen in a certain order (whatever happened to course correction?), while Daniel — perhaps banking on the variables once again — is all “Penny? That’s my sister! Yeah, she’s running a tour de stade. Go find her.”

I loved that Des finds Penny at the same stadium he and Jack met. I loved that he asks her for coffee and my breath caught because I was waiting for her to answer as Juliet mumbles at the beginning of the season. Which wouldn’t have made sense, but I was still waiting for it. (P.S. My new theory is that Juliet’s “I’d love to go for coffee” is not said to Sawyer, but to Ben.)

(Why was Penny at the stadium and why did she then suggest to meet for coffee in an hour when she’s supposed to be at this charity thing?)

And finally, the minute Desmond shakes Penny’s hand, his consciousness jumps back to the island, and we’re right back in “The Constant” territory, and . . . Desmond is different. He’s calmer. He’s TOO calm. He tells Widmore he gets it, he’s ready to start. And then with equal equanimity, he follows Zombie Sayid after watching Sayid snap a guy’s neck. My guess: Desmond now sees the whole picture. He’s fully aware of both real and imaginary timelines, what has happened in both, and more importantly what WILL happen in both. So he knows that he needs to go with Sayid, knows that Sayid is not really Sayid and more importantly that Sayid will lead him to Smokey. And why does Desmond need to find Smokey? I think there are two possibilities:

1. Desmond’s the new Jacob. No, we haven’t seen his name on the list of candidates, but. Widmore spoke of a sacrifice he was going to ask Desmond to make, once their experiment was over. I think that sacrifice could very well be “You’re never going to see your wife and son again. You have to stay on this island and protect it.”

2. Or, possibly, that Smokey is actually Faraday (this is a theory I’ve seen batted around a few times — check out Jeff Jensen’s posts on Lost, because he’s written about it, but I don’t remember for which episode. The one where Smokey tells Kate that he had a crazy mom). I’m not entirely sure I understand it, or fully buy it, but it’s intriguing, so let’s go with that as a premise) and, because Desmond is Faraday’s Constant, Desmond is the one person who can pull Faraday out of this mess, which will then somehow put everything back to rights.

Or, of course, neither one of these could be true. Or they both could be true. It’s probably something completely different and more simple. But clearly Desmond is the key to saving the island, saving the world. So the Desmond/Jacob theory I think holds some weight, despite evidence to the contrary.

I didn’t see previews for next week, but Lostpedia lists the episode title as “Everybody Loves Hugo,” which is a reference to another favorite episode of mine, “Everybody Hates Hugo,” which has my favorite Lost opening of all time.

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Meh?

Am I right?

Mostly meh, anyway. I don’t think it’s wrong to expect Lost to follow up one kickass episode with another, because they’ve done it many times before, but this was so far from kickass that now that I’m sitting down to write this I find myself mostly disappointed in it. But anyway. Some good things did happen, and some fun callback stuff happened, but some pretty ridiculous stuff also happened, so. Onward.

Let me get this straight: In the Sideways world, Sun and Jin are secret lovers but not married. Mr. Paik learns of this tryst and sends his daughter and her lover as bodyguard to LA for Keamy to kill Jin. That seems extravagant, even for Paik. I call contrivance.

I did like that Keamy and Mikhail were working together — the two guys who just! won’t! die! (And Keamy STILL didn’t die! Hilarious.) It took me a couple scenes to figure out why Mikhail looked different — he didn’t have his eye patch. And then Jin shot him in the eye at the end. Ha!

Also liked that Sayid gave Jin the means to free himself, but didn’t cut him free himself. Kinda Jacob-like, to only give someone the means to free oneself. Even though Island Sayid is an Apocalypse Now soul-dead zombie.

Knew Sideways Sun was going to get shot, and it stands to reason that she would be pregnant — that would’ve been the something she wanted to tell Jin at the hotel. Nice for the Sideways plot to end there on such a cliffhanger — will Sun survive? Will the fetus? Might JULIET make an appearance?

On the island — I don’t know how I feel about the whole aphasia thing. I think it’s mildly ridiculous but I don’t really mind it so much. I like the symmetry inherent in the way it’s Jin who speaks fluent English now, and Sun who can’t. I like that Sun’s speech was taken away so that the full force of her objections to Richard’s plan to blow up the plane couldn’t be understood. And of course, Island Sun loses her ability to speak English as we learn for sure that Sideways Sun never learned English at all. So that’s a nice connection. Even if the whole thing felt like something better suited to daytime soaps.

I thought Jack’s talk with Sun was well done as well, tomato metaphor notwithstanding (that was more than a little ridiculous. “No one told this tomato that it was supposed to die.” All I needed was a reappearance of the moth from S1). Jack seemed very Jacob-like. On a more shallow note, I like how shaggy Matthew Fox’s hair is right now.

So Widmore’s people took Jin because Jin had mapped out the terrain for the DI in 1977 and they need him to help them find other pockets of unusual energy. Because . . . they can’t read the maps themselves? They’re maps! Whatever. I don’t like Zoe (or maybe it’s the actress — either way, I don’t like her at all) so I don’t have a problem with the idea that she’s a freakin’ geophysicist but she can’t read a map.

And the electromagnetic pockets — this is what’s going to keep Smokey on the island, channeling that energy into something larger than the pylons? To use as a weapon or means of moving the island? How moving the island keeps a cork in things I don’t know. Is Widmore looking for something specific? Maybe he’s looking for something off those maps, which would then render my disdain for Zoe’s lack of map-reading skills moot. Still don’t like her.

But then Jin sees pictures of his daughter for the first time and if you hadn’t prepared for this like Jenn had then you don’t know Lost, my friends. That was very, very sweet. Also nice to see Bpo Bpo again.

Oh, and of course, DESMOND. So Desmond is “the package” (I’ll say!), which means I was right! Sort of! when I guessed it would be Desmond that Jacob was referring to in “The Lighthouse.” Because he is special, the rules don’t apply to him, etc. so it stands to reason that he would be instrumental in stopping Smokey/aligning these timelines. And man, the look between Desmond and Sayid was like an episode in itself.

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