the blast door map

the opening shot of 'white rabbit:' jack as a teenage boy

david? no, it's little jack shepard, being told by his father he doesn't 'have what it takes.'

david? no, it's young daniel faraday, practicing the same piece of music david had in his room. if a pregnant eloise died on the island, then is jack's child a course-corrected 'reincarnation' of daniel? is allowing david the chance to pursue his art the way in which faraday achieves a kind of redemption?

so there's already some interesting metaphysical basis for juliet replacing sarah in the parallel timeline - also, it would make sense for jack and juliet's marriage to play out similarly to their brief, but fruitless flirtation on the island. if the energies are the same, both jack and juliet would be drawn to each other, but each would ultimately be pulled in different directions. probably with a lot less drama and anguish than jack's marriage to sarah.

what's tricky though is that the hard-edged juliet we know and love was created as a result of her time on the island. before alpert kiled her ex-husband with a bus, juliet was weak, subservient, and utterly trapped in her job. though it became her prison, the island actually saved her in many ways. while it's too much to hope for an entire episode explaining juliet's parallel story, i'm hoping that the few scenes we get can give us proper context - perhaps she hasn't changed, is still meek, and 'finds herself' when she meets sawyer?

3. what is dogen doing in the parallel timeline?
later, at the beach, kate says:

will we look back on this conversation as ironic, or prescient? i think we can at least prepare for the adam and eve question to be answered definitively this season.

5. that lighthouse
jacob gave hurley a bunch of instructions that, in retrospect seemed only to serve the purpose of getting hurley and jack away from the temple before locke, claire, and jin show up looking for 'aaron.' the thing is at least as tall as the statue, and seems to have the exact same birds flying around it, always on hand to establish scale. at least jack said 'how did we not see this before,' because by this point, it's hard to swallow that no one's seen it, or mentioned it. it's possibly on the opposite shore from the foot statue, but this is asking us to believe that none of our main characters has circumnavigated the island yet, or if they did, it wasn't important enough to show us.. also, the time it takes to traverse distances has been seriously compressed now that the seasons are shorter, and plot points need to unravel faster. hmm. alright alright, i forgive it, though i do find it a bit irritating.

let's talk about the specifics of the lighthouse itself, which seems right out of myst - the lostpedia candidates page has been updated to cross reference all of the visible names from the cave with those in the lighthouse, and there are a few small discrepancies. are jacob and nemesis keeping their own lists? did nemesis have to make his own copy of jacob's list from the lighthouse?
we can see from stills that #108 is someone named 'wallace.' is this person actually important? we've yet to meet anyone on the show named wallace. did someone we know take a new name, like walt? walt must have taken a new name after returning to the mainland to avoid press scrutiny after the oceanic six debacle, right? walt still believes his father is alive, so it could be walt, right? or did jacob just ask hurley to turn the wheel to 108 (fun fact, this was the 108th hour of 'lost'), knowing that it would be a great enough distance for jack to notice the implications of the mechanism?

i think someone is definitely still coming to the island - desmond still has an open story arc, so my bet is that he's the person jacob is expecting. charles widmore is also a possibility..
a weird detail about the lighthouse dial is that the handwriting in which the remaining candidates names are written is considerably different from the rest of the names. it's not just darker, it's all caps, and looks over-written. on the lighthouse dial, kate is given the number 51, and her name is not crossed out. why wasn't kate's name copied into the cave?

i felt that the lighthouse scene was missing a numbers discovery moment for hurley - to have the names and numbers laid out for him on the dial and then artificially deny him the discovery felt false. undoubtedly, they are saving something big for hurley's centric episode coming later, but it just made no sense to keep the character that functions as the primary audience proxy in the dark. i also think that the absence of that discovery moment is what ultimately kept this episode from feeling as satisfying as 'the substitute,' even though it had just as many revelations and comparably excellent performances. which brings me to..

6. squirrel baby
i just hope claire chose formula over breast feeding.

it's fascinating how difficult it is to appreciate when an attractive person is a good actor until their looks are stripped. claire's role for 4 seasons on the show was pretty much to be either a pregnant victim, or a baby-holding victim, reacting to outside forces, and never really taking much action for herself. when a character's backstory is exhausted, the writer's only real option is to have the character disappear for awhile, so that a new backstory can be created to fill their centric episode (michael in season 2). emilie de ravin's performance here is great because it's reminiscent of our first encounter with rousseau in season 1's 'solitary,' but it also stands in such amazing contrast to the person who wandered into the jungle three years ago (and more recently, the pregnant girl who got off of flight 815). it's also a great payoff to having her absent for so long, to have her return to the show in such a big way. it's also just way way more fun to play crazy.

it's upsetting, though that claire seems to truly be 'infected,' and probably beyond hope of cure - apparently she was shot by the others in the leg at one point, taken to the temple, and given the same 'test' dogen gave to sayid. i think we can pretty much expect that sayid is going to go the same way.
the whole encounter has me wondering though if we're supposed to question whether or not rousseau was also infected. infected claire's behavior and actions are incredibly similar to rousseau's, though rousseau probably would never have let sayid live if she was infected. jin's timeflash adventure with rousseau seemed pretty clear that it was robert who was infected, and not rousseau. if that's the case, it's pretty amazing that rousseau avoided infection for 16 years when smokey had access to the bodies of her entire crew and could presumably take their form and attempt to manipulate her. i think we're meant to take away that rousseau-like behavior isn't the basis by which 'infection' should be determined - the litmus test is random, viscious murdering behavior.

7. preboomer
locke: am i interrupting?
jin: (another wtf face from jin - i think he has more preboomer wtf-faces than anyone) john?
claire: that's not john. this is my friend.'
(boom)

this is a setup preboomer, launching us directly into next week. but it also made me race back through my head to figure out in this fractured timeline exactly when jin last saw locke - and does jin know that locke is supposed to be dead?

jin last saw locke shimmie down the well to push the wheel and stop the island from timeflashing. it was locke's final push that trapped jin in 1977, where he learned english during the three years of working for dharma. before locke went down the well, jin gave him his wedding ring to present to sun as proof that he had died in the freighter explosion. the ring was later used by ben to prove the exact opposite, that jin is still alive, and convinced sun to board ajira 316.

though we haven't seen it on the show, we can assume based on jin's knowledge of the ajira flight, that all the survivors had a pow-wow after sawyer brought them into dharma. so jin's wtf at seeing locke is a combination of 'wow, i haven't seen you for three years,' and 'holy crap, aren't you supposed to be dead?' it could also be 'where is my wedding ring?' but i expect we'll get to that later.

8. next episode..
according to darlton, the next episode, 'sundown,' is breaking from the centricity pattern of season 1 and giving us a sayid episode instead of a sun and jin episode, though the title still seems to reference the corresponding 6th episode of season 1, 'house of the rising sun.' why the reversal of ordering? what should we watch to prepare?

i'm going to rewatch 'house of the rising sun,' primarily for the island story, 'solitary,' for a refresher on the sayid/nadia history, and 'the greater good' to be fully reminded of sayid's immediate pre-815 backstory in sydney. i have a bad feeling sayid is going to die for real in the island timeline. i have incredibly high expectations for sayid's parallel timeline story. sayid's history with nadia is not simple. he tortured her repeatedly, and she endured it because she, uh, liked him. then he killed a guard and shot himself so she could escape. not exactly a jennifer aniston movie. nadia, after being such a central character in sayid's story, was treated only as an object in the flashforwards. their reunion was heartfelt, but a huge chunk of sayid's story with nadia was told only in rough sketches. nadia functioned as a plot point but not as a character. we know that they were reunited, it was bliss for three months, she died in the car crash, and sayid spent the next three years as ben's hitman.

sayid's parallel story has the potential to redeem all of the hell sayid endured because of the island. it also has the obligation of reintroducing nadia to us as a fully developed character - as a victim of torture, a war escapee, and a woman wrapped up in an incredibly complicated web of culture, violence, and attraction. i want the parallel reunion to be satisfying, and not simple.

'solitary' was one of my favorite episodes of season 1 because it really felt like a movie-scale story. i remember thinking, as i was still discovering the format of the show, 'holy shit, we're going to iraq now..' the scale of the production, the performances, photography, writing, were all feature film quality work. if the final season is truly going to continue echoing season 1, it has to look bigger visually, but feel more intimate emotionally. it's on the right track. they just better not mess up sayid's closing act.