Don’t you see what this means?? THE SEASON PREMIERES ON GROUNDHOG DAY! The day that inspired a movie about the same thing happening over and over again, to kick off the final season of a show that’s been one huge time cycle of its own! This seals the deal — the series is ending with the Oceanic plane crash. It couldn’t be any clearer.

Oh you’d LOVE us to believe it’s just some random day the network randomly gave you, Lindelof, or should I say LIE-ndelhof, is what I’d call you if you denied that — but WE KNOW THE TRUTH. Everything on Lost is happening over again!!!! Bring back Charlie, bring back Eko, bring back Brian Doyle Murray as the mayor of Punxsatawney, cause we figured out your little PREMIERE DATE CLUE. You gotta wake up PRETTY EARLY in the DAMN MORNING to fool this guy (before 10 am).

Or…maybe the show will involve an actual groundhog:

Or maybe the show just picked a day. I can’t tell anything anymore, the show’s been off for so frickin’ long, I’m suffering from withdrawal. Heroin withdrawal. Unrelated to Lost. But not helping.

Kelley will play the recurring role of “Kendall” in the show’s final season. But, rather than just accept this minor detail and resume waiting for the season to actually start, let’s try some speculation: What is the significance of this pole dancing workout instructor being added to the show?

Some theories:

• The island was a giant pole the whole time and the survivors were merely dancing on it, erotically.
• Every Jack-centric episode will just feature constant erotic pole dancing on the screen to maintain viewers’ interest.
• Yunjin Kim got a DUI this summer and will be replaced.
• Ben will do something shady, and a pole will be there.
• The island was purgatory. Purgatory has pole dancers in it.
• Lost was really L.A. Law the whole time. The polar bear was Corbin Bernsen.

Other theories? Leave ‘em in the comments. But I’m pretty sure all of mine are correct.

Don’t miss it.

Or maybe it’s the Deluxe Season 5 box set for Lost. Like that makes sense.

Either way, it’s the perfect gift for anyone who’s way the hell more obsessed with Lost than even I am, and also has the means to play VHS tapes and floppy disks (it also comes with a Dharma Initiative 8-Track, a Dharma Initiative Commodore 64 game, and an authentic Dharma Initiative Phrenology caliper.)

Are those floppy disks for decoration or are they actual floppy disks? It’d be cool if they had the game Prince of Persia on them. That game was sweet.

• The internet is abuzz with possible Megan Fox “Catwoman” rumors, because she’s a female and Catwoman is a female and the internet is the internet.
• Whitney Houston will release her first album of new material in seven years on Monday, entitled “I Look To You.” If she really wanted to hammer that Grammy home, I’d have called it “Looking: Acoustic Duets With The Incomparable Whitney H.”
• A model was arrested for posing nude in the middle of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. What ever happened to the days of creepy male flashers on every corner of Times Square? This city’s really gone to sh*t since the early 90s.
• Paul Scheer calls our attention to this awesome new “Locke” Lost poster, aka, our daily reminder to be pissed off that it’s not February.
• And finally, I think we can all agree that these bunnies are, in fact, very sleepy.

After the jump, see how the RHONJ ladies demonstrate that reading (or even acquiring) books is a complete waste of everyone’s time-space continuum.

Does this conversation about when the “book” was discovered by each of the ladies remind anyone else of every single conversation they had with coworkers about the timeline on Lost this season?

IS THIS ONE BIG ANGELS AND DEMONS CROSS-PROMOTION?

“Jacob” is a transparently biblical name. Jacob wears white, his adversary wears black. Jacob believes in unobtrusive guidance; Guy In Black wants to kill him. Jacob has faith in the Black Rock visitors’ ability to “progress”; G.I.B. believes they’re hopeless and doomed. Jacob recommends Ajira Flight 316. Jacob wades deep into the water to catch a fish, calling to mind the visual of a baptism. Ben and The Others have taken orders from Jacob and attempted to carry out (or manipulate) his will based on conjecture, intuition, and faith, despite never actually seeing him. During Ben’s confrontation with Jacob, he mentions that he’s long desired a face-to-face meeting but was told to wait (for Heaven?) and even compares Locke to Moses, envious of his closeness to Jacob.

In short: The dude couldn’t be more God if he were ex-Providence basketball player God Shammgod.

Next question: So what is God doing with waves of island mortals? The simple answer (??) would be, Jacob and his scruffy adversary testing their disagreement by putting different groups of humans — probably not beginning with the Black Rock crew, but certainly involving them — through an island boot camp, observing their attempts to live and progress and to ultimately destroy themselves (like, say, by letting off a bomb or drilling into a mine of failure juice, like Radzinsky). Along the way, Jacob provides guidance, albeit through secondhand means or through the interpretations of a leader (perhaps Richard is a sort of clergy figure? All priests wear eyeliner, as do pirates), with the deceptive, disguised other guy — we’ll just call him “Mike Thedevil” — doing his best to tempt and confuse the human pawns. The cycle repeats itself again and again, like the spinning wheel that opened the episode HOLY CRAP SYMBOL SYMBOL THERE’S A SYMBOL RIGHT THERE EVERYONE — it also represents the circle of time that the islanders keep traveling along, and I fully expect them to wake up in 2004 when Season 6 starts (unless Abrams reads this recap, which I’m sure he does, gets intimidated, and changes the plot so they appear in like 1929.)

Ben is fulfilling the role of a sort of Job character, following the will of Jacob with complete faith despite never seeing him face to face, but (as Bizarro Locke points out) it’s only gotten him a dead daughter, failure with Juliet (more Ben’s own molestey fault than God’s), his humbling removal as Others’ leader, and the sh*t beat out of him every three episodes — when Bizarro Locke lays this information out for disillusioned Ben, he whines to Jacob like an abandoned teenager, and stabs him a bunch of times, just like Job stabs God in The Bible. Or it would be, if the Bible was awesomer.

If you dare doubt any aspect of this theory, I’ll clinch it for you right now: Jeff Fahey, aka Frank Lapidus, played a character named Jobe in The Lawnmower Man. God, set, and match. And time travel. And bombs. And impalement. Pretty sweet finale, all things considered – onto the rest…

JACOB’S LADDER (NOT A LADDER, BUT THAT’S THE LAZIEST PUN I COULD COME UP WITH BESIDES “JACOB AND THE FAT MAN” WHICH I’M NOW THINKING IS BETTER)

During his numerous flashbacks, an unaging, obviously clairvoyant Jacob…

1) Pays for Kate’s lunchbox (New Kids On The Block…OF TIME???)
2) Gives lil’ Sawyer a pen to write his adorable death threat.
3) Asks Sayid for directions just before his girlfriend is hit by a car (saving Sayid’s life? Bachelorizing Sayid so he can hook up with Ilana and get dragged to the island? Or was Nadia secretly eeeeeevil?)
4) Wishes Jin and Sun good luck at their wedding (in “excellent” Korean, just like God)
5) Waits for Hurley in a cab and straight-up tells him he’s not crazy and should return to the island, gives Jack his stuck vending machine treat, and…
6) Touches Locke’s shoulder after his paralyzing window-fall, seemingly rejuvenating him. In all, seems that Sayid and Locke got the sweetest plums, having their lives saved and all compared to Sawyer’s pen and Jack’s candy, but Jacob’s conscious presence in the lives of the future Oceanics followed a pattern; Jacob sums this up best in his seemingly innocuous line to Jack about the vending machine, “just needed a little push.” Indeed, Jacob’s mission is to guide the Oceanics without overtly intruding or making his presence known, just like, oh, I don’t know, GODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGODGOD.

Or maybe “just a little push” is a reference to the Billy Joel song “Captain Jack.” Crap, it’s probably that. Scrap the previous eleven paragraphs.

JACK VS. SAWYER = MEEE-YOW

It says something about the innate connection us dedicated Lost time-wasters fans have developed with the show that my immediate reaction to Sawyer’s line “well I guess there’s nothing I can say to change your mind” was to throw my hands up in anticipation for a punch. Another way of saying “innate connection,” for those of you too lazy to type it into an online thesaurus, is “Jacob-damn was that predictable,” but who’s counting? You can watch the Sawyer/Jack fight again here.

Juliet snaps on the sub, knocks out some Dharmas and gets herself, Sawyer, and Kate back to the island to stop Jack from blowing everything up / actually being involved in a plot and trying to act, but later interrupts Sawyer’s dominant fight over Jack and pleads with him not to interfere with the bomb detonation because she finally picked up on Sawyer’s 670,000 conspicuous looks at Kate and decides “or maybe we should blow everything up.” Who does she think she is, GEORGE W. BUSH am I right people oh snap I went there wooo satire I tell it like it is move over Doonesbury yeaaah baby yeaaaahhhh show me the money!

The islanders regroup and head for the Swan, arriving at the peak of Radzinsky’s “I’m an a-hole so I’m gonna demand we keep doing this and kill ourselves” plan (he’s from the Doctor Octopus Spider-Man 2 School of Villainy), and engage the Dharmas in a Western-shootout, with Sawyer eventually capturing Phil and allowing Jack to drop the bomb down the mineshaft unmolested. He prepares himself, he looks at Kate, then Sawyer looks at Juliet, then Sawyer looks at Kate, then Juliet looks at Jack, then Kate looks at Phil, then Chang looks at Sawyer, then Miles looks at Baby Charlotte, then Roger Linus looks at a cartoon raccoon that shrugs at the camera as if to say “these crazy people!”, then finally drops the bomb towards the electromagnetic energy center, but nothing happens. Nothing, until all metal starts flying down the shaft, impaling Phil with tuning forks and dragging Juliet to her apparent doom after one of the most intense “HOLD ON!” scenes this side of the Cliffhanger opening sequence (and the Good Son climax). Hurley then turns to the camera and says “Talk about a chain of fools!” in the version of the episode I directed in my mind.

At the very end of the episode, Juliet springs back to life — now looking like the example photo on a Halloween fake blood kit — and with her last ounce of strength, manages to detonate the bomb by hitting it with a rock (this is how all bombs are detonated, no exceptions). This causes the first-ever fade-to-WHITE “LOST” end titler. I would’ve bet money that the show was gonna end with the first minute after the explosion, showing us something super-cryptic before cutting off for the season, but they didn’t even give us that; I say they all wake up in Bizarro Locke’s time, but with their prior knowledge intact and Jacob still dead. I can’t imagine everything will have been undone, it’d be a total waste of five seasons, but I definitely see the series ending on more of an “everything coming back together” note than a “one final weird ending twist” note. We’ll see (in a damn year).

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, ROSE & BERNARD

Finally, the answer to about 12 commenters’ queries per week: Rose and Bernard are alive and “retired.” They’ve been living in intentional isolation in a shack by the beach, hoarding food, dodging Jin’s “sector sweeps,” and deliberately avoiding being pulled back into the ongoing problems of Sawyer and the other Dharma impostors. For all the crap we gave the producers every week for conveniently ignoring these two, this eventual resolution, however last-minute, actually makes a great deal of sense, and wrapped up their subplot more satisfactorily that I would’ve expected from seven-second out-of-nowhere scene.

As a reward from the producers for making it through the season without complaining about screentime, playoff-bearded Bernard even got to say his very own “son of a bitch!” line.

LOSTDS AND ENDS

– I imagine Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse argued for months like kids with a lemonade stand about who got their name first in the writing credits, and came up with this compromise:

– Funniest moment of the episode? Jack getting hit in the head with a magnetic box of tools. Hahaha…hit in the head with a magnetic box of tools. I’m still laughing! Someone please submit that two seconds for Best Comedy Series Emmy consideration.

– What’s the relationship between Jacob and Ilana? Jacob remains anonymous when he appears to the rest of the Oceanics, but he consciously recruits bandaged Ilana and she appears to know who he is. Her too-late arrival at the statue foot with the body of Locke appears to be Jacob’s last-ditch effort to warn people about Mike Thedevil (personally, I assumed the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs were in the case, but my film professor disagrees), also indicating that Locke’s death was the “loophole” Devil was looking for. What makes Ilana so special? How does Devil assume the physical body of Locke even though Locke’s corpse is still there and still dead?

– Flannery O’Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge. Didn’t manage to read this book last night in anticipation of the recap (sorry, sorry) but if it’s about things rising and converging, that seems significant. Suck on that dynamite analysis, Doc Jensen. Or should I say, DUCK Jensen. I said you are like a duck!

– Another theory, proposed by a friend: what if Jacob ISN’T the good one? What if the white and niceness were in place to throw us off, like how 24 always has one character act overtly shady but it turns out he was nice and the other character was behind it the whole time? Doesn’t really make total sense plot-wise, but Jacob was semi-responsible for a lot of bad outcomes (tons of deaths, broken hearts, etc.) but so is God, so that doesn’t disprove anything.

– Jacob and Mike Thedevil have been crashing things into the island for a very long time:

– Episode codename, “The Fork In The Outlet”? Prrrrobably refers to the huge explosion that ends everything. This is the only thing the Recap I’m confident about (ooops, keep forgetting not to let the readers know I’m completely full of sh*t when it comes to Lost or anything else…better say something smart quick…) “John Locke” is the name of a philosopher.

– And finally, in the “Next Season On Lost” teaser, the spoiler to end all spoilers:

THERE’S AN EYE IN SEASON 6!!!!!!!!! 

Whose eye do you think it is???? God???????? The Devil?????????????? I’m gonna go out on a limb and sayyyyyyyyyyyy…Locke’s Body. Because everything turns out to be Locke’s body. In fact, the whole show is taking place inside Locke’s body. Hate to spoil that for all of you, but I’m positive — I saw the final script, and the last shot of the series is Locke’s body. The episode is called “Locke’s Body” and the script itself is shaped like Locke’s body.

Just try to act surprised when it happens.

Finale thoughts, theories, predictions, favorite/least favorite parts, Rose/Bernard love, and anything else Lost-related — leave ‘em in the comments. This is your last chance until 2010, and who knows, the internet may not even exist then.

I’ll leave my predictions below (spoilers, obviously) — feel free to do the same in the comments, the more ridiculous, the better (and more likely to be correct):

- Locke’s declaration that he’s going to “kill” Jacob refers to the fact that there is actually no Jacob and the will of the island is independent of anything Ben and Richard can interpret; they’ve just been stringing the Others along using the idea of Jacob to control them. 75% chance of Locke/Ben/Richard violence.

- Rose and Bernard will return to chicken-fight Radzinsky and Phil.

- Richard will think he sees Jack & Co. die when the bomb/electromagnetic energy explodes, but they’ll really be flung back into a time warp (Hurley will make a Rocky Horror joke directly to camera).

- Caesar is Superjacob, Jacob’s boss.

- The episode will end with the Oceanics back on the island in 2004, in the same situation as Season One, but with their existing knowledge and with a newly uncertain outcome.

- The episode will begin with some 70s pop song playing with a title that loosely corresponds to something explained later in the episode (I’m thinking “Shake Your Groove Thing”)

- We have to learn what brought suddenly-terrified Hurley back to the island, right? I’m thinking he gets a call from Damon Lindelof demanding that he go along with the other Oceanics so he can make sure to say “Time travel — cuuhhhrazzyyyy!!!” every couple minutes. (Seriously though, a Hurley-centric finale would be awesome)

- Ben has to have something badass up his sleeve, right? He’s been largely neutered for the past half-season, managing to shoot Caesar and failing to shoot Penny and otherwise doing very little overt evil. Maybe he’ll just DDT Aaron mid-episode just to get out the pent-up shady.

- Locke and Sun will f**k. And it’ll be hardcore and ABC will show it all. Didn’t see THAT comin’, did ya?

LOCKE IS AN ANNOYING BOSS

Locke set a record for most sh*t-eating grins in one hour of television, exuding a creepy satisfaction throughout this entire episode that actually made me feel bad for Ben and Richard. Locke sure seems like he has a point, though; he taunts Ben with the knowledge that Ben’s never actually seen Jacob, and reveals this information to a collection of extras and Sun in the form of an infomercial spiel, with Sun even stepping forward and asking the scripted question “But can Jacob really bring my husband Jin back? Wow, I’d be a sucker NOT to give you my money!”

Ben and Richard then share a brief aside, in which they shadily discuss dealing with the John Locke “problem”:

Have Ben and Richard been co-opting the existence of Jacob to control the Others this whole time, even though they’ve never actually seen him? I doubt they’ve just been thinking they’re talking to Jacob and are wrong, there’s gotta be some level of Ben-conniving behind it, but Richard too? It’s just like the movie Zardoz!!! Anyone? This thing on? Alright, it’s a lot more like Locke is Jesus, but that analogy doesn’t involve a shirtless Sean Connery and a floating stone head (or maybe it does, I never read the thing cover to cover).

Ultimately, Locke reveals that he’s going to “kill” Jacob, making for the finest “WTF/awesome” cryptic ending line of the season. Are Jacob and “the island” at odds, and John is killing whatever they believe Jacob is to unleash the island’s true wishes? Wowee, that sentence sounds retarded. As for Richard’s equally-cryptic opening-titler line, “I remember them…I watched them all die,” does this mean that Jack’s bomb plan is going to blow up in his face (PUNPUNPUNPUN!) or that he’s witnessed a potential past that Jack and crew would only befall if they fail? Either way, awesome episode, for the second straight week, and it’s setting up for one BOMB-bastic finale (not a pun, that’s just how I believe that word is written.)

SAWYER IS GETTIN’ TOO OLD FOR THIS SH[EXPLOSION]

Sawyer got the crap beat out of him by a typically annoying Radzinsky last night — when the director called over the blood-makeup dude, he instinctively went over to Michael Emerson and they had to be like ‘no no, actually Sawyer this time’ — but refused to reveal the location of the Others or explain where Kate and Jack had gone and his relationship with them (also knowing that they’d never believe him). Phil then gets the brilliant and correct idea to make him talk by punching Juliet, which draws an immediate Sawyer “SON OF A BITCH,” though Sawyer is in a “boy cried wolf” situation with his “son of a bitch”es, where he says it so often and for such a range of reasons, that when he really means it, as in ’stop punching my girlfriend you son of a bitch,’ it just doesn’t carry the same impact — it’d be like Rodney Dangerfield saying “I really and truly feel disrespected by that!”

Meanwhile, Radzinsky — who’s taking that gunshot rather well, I might add — decided he’s the leader of the Dharmas after they all ran onto the submarine and underwent a dramatic Crimson Tide mutiny-type situation that got cut for time, and strikes a deal to allow allow Sawyer and Juliet to board the sub in exchange for drawing a map of the hostiles. Sawyer and Juliet agree, and after several tense minutes of all of us viewers expecting Sawyer to take a valiant turn on his captors and escape and rush to help his friends, he merely turns and says “good riddance” to the island and boards the ship.

Buuuuut just when everything appeared like it wasn’t going to be an awkward love triangle of subtle glances, the Dharmas bring Kate on board the sub and seat her right next to Juliet, facing Sawyer. They then bring Sawyer’s parents, high school crush, childhood pastor, and friend who watched him masturbate during a party when he was eighteen, and an actual, literal white elephant onto the ship and seat them all one foot from Sawyer’s face, with no explanation. In the “next week on Lost” clip, however, we see that Sawyer is already off the boat and interacting with Jack, meaning that the boat has turned around for some reason, or that the clip of the ship submerging was just unrelated CGI’d stock footage and the real sub hasn’t left the island yet. Probably the second thing.

WE’RE GOING BACK…TO THE FUTU….LATER TIME, I MEAN. BACK TO THE LATER TIME! NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT HERE.

Jack: Think about it, Kate — All this misery will be over.

Kate: It wasn’t all misery.

[Exchange of glances]

Kate: Ok, so the middle of Season Two was pretty miserable, that I won’t argue. But erase the whole show?

Surely enough, Kate decided she didn’t want to aid Jack in carrying out Faraday’s atomic bomb plan, partly because she couldn’t bear the thought of erasing her entire history and future with Jack and Sawyer, and partly because she didn’t want to detonate an atomic bomb on an island and kill herself and a bunch of other people. Nevertheless, Jack finds a partner for his bomb quest in Not-too-old, Not-too-young, but Juuuuust Right Eloise, who’s beginning to piece together her Daniel experiences and believes that Jack has indeed traveled in time. The group is also joined by Sayid, who arrives by shooting an aggressive Other surprisingly, because he definitely couldn’t have just appeared and been like “Sup, Jack. How’s things?”

The bomb is located in the Jolly Roger Bay level from Mario 64, and Jack, Eloise, and Sayid manage to swim underwater into the secret bombcave to the find the bomb, leading to this awkward product shot:

People did notice that Lost showed a bunch of PC ads and Sawyer just so happened to mention to Juliet “we’ll buy Microsoft,” right? Coincidence: unlikely. If they throw completely random zoomed-in shots of the GE logo into next week’s episode…

LOSTDS AND ENDS

– In the opening sequence, when Eloise said “These people aren’t from Dharma” and Widmore responded “Then where the hell are they from,” I was expecting her to say yet again, “You mean…WHEN are they from…” and a bell to start ringing and a bunch of confetti to start falling from the sky and Damon Lindelof to come out to present a giant novelty check to Eloise for uttering the one millionth instance of “WHEN are we.” I’m very glad this didn’t happen.

– Locke’s line, “I’m not afraid of anything you can do anymore, Ben” was the most emasculating thing anyone on the show has ever spoken. I hope Ben has something up his sleeve for the finale and hasn’t actually been broken by Locke.

– “Who’s Hugo Reyes?” “The fat guy.” Immediate cut to Hurley grabbing armfuls of canned food. Pretty funny comic-relief moment that for once didn’t self-awarely poke fun at how ridiculous all the time travel stuff is, for the first time in about fifteen weeks.

– Despite the amazing opening and closing “cut to LOST titler” lines, Locke’s reveal to Ben “Who is that man, Locke” “…ME” was the single least surprising twist of the season. Not that it was a bad moment, but we had literally seen that entire seen occur before already, so why did the show feel the need to treat Locke’s “ME” line with dramatic music and a “dun dun!!!” cut to commercial? Just have it happen.

Episode thoughts, theories observations, finale predictions, Rose/Bernard lamentations, and unfounded “I’m done with this show” declarations — leave ‘em all in the comments!

THIS FATHER-SON PICNIC IS GETTING CROWDED

We learned last week that Miles was officially Pierre Chang’s son, and learned earlier in the season that Charlotte’s parents were Dharmas and briefly raised her on the island, but this week’s dad-bombshell made the others look like the wussy “Michael was the man on the boat!” twist: Faraday is the son of Eloise Hawking and CHARLES WIDMORE (well-known sidenote: women love douchebags). This means that Faraday’s inclusion in the freighter party was only partially motivated by his skills but also partially motivated by his parents’ adorable desire to heal his aching mind (as long as he didn’t use it to play that gayass piano, right Mom? I’m pretty sure she calls it “gayass” in one of the deleted scenes.) It’s only a matter of time now before we learn that Frank Lapidus was the son of Richard Alpert and a polar bear, with Richard actually being the mother in some bizarre Junioresque flashback plot (season finale! Fork In The Outlet!) and Ben and Widmore are actually each other’s fathers and their incestuous baby together was the island. I give this a 50/50 chance of actually happening.

However, Eloise isn’t just Daniel’s regular ol’ piano-hating mother — she also has been foreseeing the future for quite some time now, including, shot-Faraday believes, an intentional decision to send him back to the island with the knowledge that he would die there. We’ve known that Eloise has had a grip on destiny since her cryptic encounter with Desmond in the jewelry store, but during Desmond’s hospitalization for his deflected-by-eggs gunshot wound, Eloise reveals to Penny that she’s experiencing difficulty seeing the future for the first time in a very long while. Does this mean that the Oceanic “Variables” in the past manage to accomplish something to change the course of destined events, thus blurring Eloise’s vision? But if the 70s events took place before the majority of Eloise’s future-seeing life, wouldn’t she retroactively have never seen the future?

In the words of this week’s wink-to-audience layman’s construction worker dude, “Time travel? How stupid does that guy J.J. Abrams think we are? J.J. Chang, I mean. No Pierre Chang, I mean, crap. Can we take that again?”

ELECTROMAGNETIC PLANETA-RY!

“You have to wear a hardhat down here” Daniel is told, because if earth-imploding electromagnetic energy is unexpectedly unleashed, you’re gonna want to protect your head with an inch of plastic — I’m counting on someone yelling a Radioactive Man style “my head!!! The hardhats do nothing!” if the explosion happens next week.

Daniel’s plan, he finally reveals after giving people really limited information then saying “I’ll be back in a minute” seventy times, is to counteract the impending release of electromagnetic energy from within the island by detonating the atomic bomb he told Alpert to bury; Faraday develops this uncharacteristically intrusive plan after undergoing an epiphany and realizing that even though the world’s destiny cannot be changed from the past, the outcome for individual humans, the “variables,” is actually alterable. The way he puts it, “I took into account the constants but not the variables! I’m a supreme ultra calculating whiz but forgot one of the TWO components of this equation! Ooopsie doopsie doo!” [Paraphrasing]

Now that Daniel has been shot by his own mother in the past (hooo-ey, that’s the Lost I know and love) and appears to be dead, the islanders are faced with a dilemma: carry out Daniel’s plan in his stead, or go back to trying to make due with the situation the best they can and stay alive without altering the future. Theoretically, a successful counteraction of the electromagnetic energy by the bomb would cause the Oceanic plane to have never crashed in the first place, thus erasing their experiences on the island — as my roommate put it, “If they pull this off, do my Lost DVDs just disappear.” The answer is yes.

Unfortunately, if we recall from Season One (remember back that far? “Johnny Angel” topped the pop charts, gasoline cost a nickel, and Lost was showing us how the lives of the Oceanic survivors on the island mirrored their past experiences…) all of the survivors are living pretty crappy lives before the crash, and they’re gonna have to think long and hard about whether they want to give up magical healing island fantasy in exchange for being a fugitive / cursed lottery winner / alcoholic doctor (Rose was about to become an alcoholic doctor, I mean). So basically, the last few episodes of the season are set up nicely with about 1,500 dilemmas, ranging from “should we do this?” to “how do we do this?” to “will Jack & Kate / Sawyer & Kate ever see each other again if this works?” to “will someone please shoot Radzinsky in his brain?”

CAAAAALBACKS!

The episode also tied up a couple loose ends; we flashed back to Faraday tearfully shaking while watching the news of the fake Oceanic remains being discovered, now knowing that his mind was essentially broken at the time and he was subconsciously aware of what he was eventually going to have to do. He was also a little upset because he knew that Charles Widmore always shows up to his house to talk about events on the news three seconds after he watches them.

Pierre Chang also let loose his own “God help us all,” meaning that he watched the same Jerry Bruckheimer trailer that Mrs. Hawking saw, and we also revisited Faraday’s conspicuous bumping into Dr. Chang underground (did Daniel pick his pocket) and widdle Charlotte’s delivery of the line “I’m not allowed to have chocolate before dinner,” thus repeating future Charlotte’s eventual last words. At this rate, Lost might actually tie up all its loose ends before the series finale, if the finale airs in 2038.

LOSTDS AND ENDS

– “You’re son is Benjamin Linus?” “GOOD LORD NO!” Eloise’s episode-opening exchange with Penny was a bit of a tip-off about the Widmore/Daniel blood connection, but if she’s actually on Widmore’s side and fake-helped Ben to get the Oceanics back to the island, does that mean Ben’s actually been had? How will the return of the Oceanics benefit Widmore? I imagine that’ll depend on whether or not they reverse the course of surviving human history, which should happen in the next episode or two.

– The pauses between the last-line bombshells and the commercial breaks were all SUPER long this week. The strings just kept getting higher and higher pitched until they entered “only dogs can hear it” territory; the music after the last line of the season is just gonna shatter every window and set off every car alarm within a three-mile radius of any tv sets, including ones that aren’t even tuned to Lost.

– Next episode opens with Sawyer saying “Get up, Twitchie, you crazy sonofabitch,” and Alpert answering, “Dude, not cool.”

– Was kid Charlotte from the Village of the Damned?

– I kept expecting Ben and Locke to just walk by in the background and wave to the camera.

– The code to the sonic fence is 141717 – I Googled it to see if there were any biblical implications or anything, and this page was the first Google result. Don’t click that unless you wish to have EVERY ANSWER OF LOST SPOILED FOR YOU IMMEDIATELY. It all makes so much sense now.

Episode thoughts, theories, predictions, observations, details, favorite lines, and satisfaction at the amount of actual things that happened last night — leave ‘em all in the comments!