Agreed about Rousseau's story being a letdown.

I think Jacob either "possesses" people or takes on different forms. Wasn't the time that Christian was referring to when Locke went into the cabin and talked to both Christian and Claire?

I've been wondering if they were going to bring back Walt. They certainly could with the passage of 3 years and all, and then make it a big *surprise* moment at the end of an episode.

I'm thinking that Locke set off another sort of time anomaly by turning the wheel again, and it could be that it separates everyone on the island into traveling to different times, maybe not remembering what's going on, etc.

thank god she's dead.

From season one, episode one... and years of questions and denials.

The island is purgatory....


Maybe not in the biblical term, but the island is about the sins of the father and making things right.

If they bring back Walt they'll have to go Dick York/Dick Sargent on us, because that kid actor is probably 6'2" and 230 lbs by now.

There is gonna be an episode with Walt, but they're using him as he is now, so I am guessing it's just gonna be another time travel one and don't expect him to be requierd to be back on the island. I can't remember where I saw it but I saw the cast list for an episode centered around Locke's time back on the mainland.

I really think his growth could be more or less explained/played down by the passage of 3+ years. Kids grow a lot during that time. Maybe not as much as he has, but I don't see why it's such a huge stretch. None of the other characters have seen him in that amount of time so any of them that see him now could naturally act surprised at how different he looks. I forget how old Walt is supposed to be, but I'm guessing he should be about 14 or 15 at this point in the story. The actor is 17. It's a passage of 5 years in real life versus 3 and a half in the story. Not an enormous difference.

Here are my top 10 observations after watching the fifth episode of Lost Season 5:

1. Island getaways are so expensive these days, you might even say they cost an arm and a leg.

2. Speaking of which, I’ll bet Locke is wishing he still had his wheelchair right about now.

3. I’m not sure why the smoke monster makes all of those mechanical cranking sounds, but they sure remind me of an old school rollercoaster. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t really be all that shocked to learn that Montagne de L’espace at EuroDisney has severed the limb of many a Frenchman over the years.

4. By the way, if the folks in R&D over at Brinks aren’t working around the clock feverishly trying to develop their own version of the smoke monster for consumer use, I’m switching to ADT! It warms the gravy-soaked cockles of my heart to envision ol’ “Smokeyâ€

Bob, you've jumped the shark

was it a Dharma shark?

i finally watched last night's episode and i liked that it felt leaner than recent ones. the russo story notwithstanding, i liked that it was kept relatively simple like in the first couple of seasons before it got weighed down with existential baggage. plus we got smoke monster and numbers. at this point that's really what i want to hear about most.

That implies I was any good to begin with, which is a very flawed assumption.

I have a hard time reading Bob's posts with that Jalen Rose video going all the time. It's also screwing me up as I type this.

I think Charlotte and Daniel are bro and sis. Great episode this week, possibly best of the year IMO.

my sis observed that the woman who showed faraday the big bomb on the island was his mom. maybe that's obvious – they made it pretty obv at the time – but it flew by me.

I wouldn't call it obvious, but I got the same impression.

totally didn't notice that. . . thanks.

is that spoiler? hope not. i forgot, but apparently young mom was a blonde named ellie (eloise), and faraday recognizes and gives her one of his time travel looks that i hope he stops making. why is he even surprised at these things?

so, what, is eloise trying to get back to the island herself, through/with part of the oceanic however many? and for what reason to do with bbbomb?

i like this trend toward convergence of the diaspora of stories that have been percolating since last season.

and i vote that eloise be cast in the next harry potter movie. . . that, or a remake of mary poppins.

Decent episode. I felt like the whole "everything needs to be just as it was the first time you went" bit was kind of cheesy. Hopefully there's a really good explanation, though.

Other than that, I kept waiting for someone to get decked by the pendulum and was disappointed it didn't happen. (Bob, I'm sure you'll also mention this in your top-10 this week )

Yeah, most of last night's episode rubbed me the wrong way. Part of it was just really hackneyed, cliched dialogue with cheesy delivery (even for Lost) in the first half, and part of it was just the disappointingly ludicrous way that they had to get back to the island. You thought the big underground wheel was bad? Ugh. Hurley having a copy of Y the Last Man had me really hoping that Brian K. Vaughan wasn't responsible for this one because if he was, he's really not helping the show.

And yeah, I kept waiting for that pendulum to come back and knock Desmond right off screen. Would have really helped that whole sequence.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to really dislike the episode. It did push things along and get us a lot further than I thought we'd be by now. Plus it set up a lot of new mysteries around just how everyone got convinced to get on that plane after all. I have a feeling that whatever motivated Kate (or whatever she had to do with Aaron) and whatever happened to Ben will have some big repercussions.

Though, again on the down side, all this magical stuff is making the island seem more and more like a purgatory type of place.

I loved the Frank Lipidis (sp) part. "We're not going to Guam, are we?"

I thought it was a fun episode. The old lady is a bit too melodramatic in her delivery for me though.

Also, I think Ben tried to kill Penny (obviously) and Desmond whooped his ass and threw him overboard. That's my hope anyway.

Oh, you might be right! He was at a dock, after all.

Yeah, there's a lot wrong with all the hocus jebus pocus shit being introduced. Although, I did like the fact that we finally learned that the island is constantly moving, which ties back in with the old theory that the island is actually a very small interdimensional moon orbiting in an elipse through and around the earth, which would also tie into the time loop theory, which would explain why Locke can walk and Rose doesn't have cancer and why certain people can't be killed off the island (put simply: because they're living in a time before all those things happened). So there's still hope this series doesn't jump the shark, but this season so far has that fishy smell.

haha...I actually turned to my wife when Desmond was on his tirade and told her it would be cool if the pendulum knocked him on his ass. That thing looked very heavy, and was moving really fast.

Top 10 to come later today...

i just kept thinking "man that pendulum must've made editing the scene a bitch"