Well, I didn’t intend to write a recap of the season opener, either, but I just can’t help myself.  Strap in, bunkies, this is going to be longish.  As a hat tip to Erika of LongLiveLocke, I encourage you to mouse over the images.  I’m feeling a bit saucy tonight.

We finally got to meet the elusive Jacob, who (like all the smart guys in high school) apparently spent a lot of time in Home Ec.

After a tasty naked fish taco (fist pump to Miles!) he had a little confab with his apparent long-time frenemy, the Man in Black.  Thanks to the Nameless One’s fashion choice, I will henceforth be referring to him as “Johnny Cash,” or Johnny for short.  Which turns out to be a marvelously appropriate nickname, given what we find out at the end of the episode.  THEORY: I am reasonably certain that Johnny Cash is Smokey.

Apparently, Johnny has a pretty poor opinion of humanity.  Jacob prefers to keep it on the sunny side, insisting that progress is not only possible, but that it’s happening beneath Johnny’s very nose, if only he would see it.

Oh, and Johnny wants to kill Jacob with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.  To which sentiment Jacob is all “Whatever.  Keep dreaming, bub.”

Back in 1977, Kate and Sawyer bicker about whether or not they should attempt to escape the sub and put the kibosh on Jack’s plan to reset history.  Juliet beats the snot out of the next guard to walk by, I’m pretty sure just to get the two of them to stop flirt-fighting, already.

I am probably the only person who was reminded of Expose, the Charlie’s Angels-esque show from the Nikki and Paolo flashback, where Billy Dee Williams was the suave, secretive boss of a team of female crimefighters.  I’m just saying: Juliet and Kate as butt-kicking crimefighters in the 70s working for a pimped out Sawyer?  Full. of.WIN.

Jack and Sayid successfully extract the far more portable, yet equally bombtastic, core of Jughead.  After Richard does the whole “I’m knocking you unconscious for your own good” thing on Eloise and presumably heads off to the nearest nuclear fallout shelter,  Jack and Sayid almost successfully tote it in a backpack right out of Dharmaville.

Unfortunately, Ben’s dad picks that particular moment to get all observant, and starts firing at Sayid, who probably should have broken out his mad Iraqi ninja skillz, rather than trying to go the diplomacy route.

Jack’s diplomacy skills may suck, but at least he knows better than to try them out while facing the gun-toting dad of the ‘tween you just shot a few days back.  Just sayin’.

At this point, Hurley once again pulls his patented Dharma rescue van maneuver, and they all head off to the Swan station, with the magically bullet-proof yet supposedly still volatile thermal detonator thermonuclear device in tow. (If Artzt had been carrying that backpack, we all know what would have happened.)

Sawyer’s Angels make a brief pit stop at Rose and Bernard’s lo-fi Island condo, and after turning down a cuppa tea, strike an intercept course with the Dharma Van of Doom 2.0.

Sawyer repeats Ben’s line from the Season 3 finale about Jack owing him five minutes.  Apparently, Jack will fall for that line every time.  After unsuccessfully attempting to talk him out of blowing up the island, Jack and Sawyer commence to crack open the respective cans of whup@$$ that both have been wanting to dish out for five solid seasons.

Unlike a lot of fans, I enjoyed the “love quadrangle” stuff in this episode.  I also think there was an important clue in what Jack said to Sawyer “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,” a theme echoed more sadly in Juliet’s Jacob-less flashback.  I think Jack may believe that somehow, some way, he’ll find Kate in whatever alternate universe they create.  And this time, he won’t screw it up.  More on this in a bit.

Back in 2007, Locke and the Others arrive at the Ginormous Foot of Jacob, and Locke gets Ben psyched about killing Jacob.  Illana and her crew, along with Lapidus, catch up to the Others for a short Latin Q&A with Richard, and reveal the still-quite-dead body of John Locke, which they’ve been toting around in their stainless steel ark of the covenant.  Unfortunately, it’s too late for them to stop Ben from killing Jacob in a fit of deity disappointment.

One comment from “Locke” that is way scarier now that we know he’s actually Johnny?  When he tells all the Others to take a breather, because he has plans for them later.  Bearing in mind his creepy “I’ve already eaten” comment from the opening scene, I’m inferring that these are not plans to make s’mores around the campfire.

As Jacob gasps his last (maybe) he tells Johnny “They’re coming.”  Johnny does not take this news well, and angrily shoves him into the fire pit.

Back in 1977, all the pastaways (a term I have shamelessly coopted from Doc Jensen) finally come together to form the A-Team, and attempt to help Jack blow up the Swan just as the Incident starts electromagnetically yanking everything from Jeeps to winches down the drill hole.

The remarkably resilient nuclear device fails to blow up on impact.  Miles saves his dad (but not his dad’s hand) in a very “Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi” moment. Jack gets knocked unconscious.  Juliet gets tangled in some chains and dragged down the rabbit hole, despite Sawyer and Kate’s best efforts to save her, and then she successfully detonates the bomb with a rock.

And everybody dies.  Maybe.  But probably not, since we have a whole other season left.

My current crazy theory about where we go from here:

I haven’t mentioned the Jacob flashbacks because my whole theory about what’s going to happen next season hinges on them.

I think the pastaways are in “King’s Cross.”  (If you’ve read all the Harry Potter books, you know what I mean by that.  If you haven’t, I’m not going to be the one to spoil you.)

I don’t think Jack was telling Kate that none of them had gained anything from the experiences of the last three years in Follow the Leader.  I think he was saying what the few had gained wasn’t, in the cosmic scheme of things, worth the death of the many.

Jack is acting on faith that given it all to do over again, he and his surviving friends can find some other path to redemption that doesn’t involve the death of the couple hundred folks on Oceanic 815.  In other words, what if it wasn’t the Island, after all?  What if they were all at rock bottom and ready to change, anyway?

“If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

Ultimately, I think all of the 1977 Losties made a conscious choice to sacrifice what they’ve  gained to save the people who’ve been LOST.

They’ve made the sacrifice the Island demanded.  A sacrifice no one in its long history has ever made.  In being willing to sacrifice their gains and quite probably their own lives for just the chance, not even the certainty, of saving others, they’ve proven Jacob right.

I think Jacob allowed Ben to kill him, because he has a Longer Con going on than Johnny knows.  His endgame includes his own death.  The “they” who are coming?  The Losties who have made a similar, parallel sacrifice.  But they’re coming back with something extra.  I think their collective choice to sacrifice themselves freed Jacob to go back to various points in their history and give them each a gift in return.

“Be good, Katie.” “Let it go, James.” “It’s not me who doesn’t believe in you, son.”  ”You’re not crazy.  You’re not cursed.  You’re blessed.”

Maybe they just needed a little push.

I think that little touch Jacob gave each of them contained the germ of a memory–the sum of what they’ve learned in this timeline.  And that half-remembered dream will end up being, for each of them, the little push they needed to choose a better path.  I think giving them that is Jacob’s loophole. He can’t interfere with their free will–but he can now give them a little push in the right direction.

What if Kate didn’t murder her dad?

What if James never became a con man?

What if Jack didn’t push his dad to suicide?

What if Sayid didn’t follow Ben on a vengeance-fueled killing spree?

What if all of them ended up on Ajira 316 anyway?

Well, we’ve got plenty of time to speculate.

You may be thinking “How does she manage to cram two or three episodes of LOST into one post?”

Truthfully, my ability to condense complex information in an entertaining fashion is LEGEND, people.  More than one person has told me I missed my calling, working for Reader’s Digest, because I can sum up ANYTHING.  Last summer, I managed to summarize the entire run of the series up to that point for my youngest sister in a half hour.  Sure, it wasn’t Lost in 8:15 brief, but I’m pretty sure she enjoyed my retelling more than Hurley’s mom enjoyed his.

Daniel, Miles, Charlotte, and a lot of red shirts who’d survived the attack of the flaming arrows regroup at the creek, since that’s where Sawyer yelled they should go.  Sawyer and Juliet aren’t there, having been detained by some British-accented, WWII-era fatigue clad gentlemen, most of whom were dispatched by Locke and whatever is left of his 400 knives from Season 1.

Unfortunately, since Sawyer yelled out “meet up at the creek” the bad guys pretty much knew exactly where everyone was going.  Which might have mattered even more, had most of the red shirts not managed to blow themselves up by tripping over some land mines.  Ouch.  At any rate, several arrow-wielding folks show up to collect Daniel, Charlotte and Miles, led by a cheeky blonde woman with yet another British accent.

Juliet, Sawyer and Locke discover that hand-chopping fatigue guys are Others when one starts speaking Latin to the other, which is apparently the Official Language of Enlightened Others.  Juliet tries to convince them to take them to the Others’ present camp, where Richard evidently is still keeping up his kickbutt skincare regimen, and when one starts to give directions, the other quickly breaks his neck (although not with his feet, so Sayid is still the  Grand Master of Neck Breaking) and bolts into the woods.

With some ghost-whispering help from Miles, Detective Daniel pieces together that they’re in the 50s, and that the Others think they’re with the U.S. Military on a mission to extract Jughead–a leftover hydrogen bomb from America’s Pacific testing program.  He also realizes, thanks to some radiation burns on a random Other, that the bomb is a little cracked, and offers to “render it inert.”

Sawyer, Juliet and Locke arrive at the camp just in time to see Daniel getting marched off into the jungle by Perky British Blonde Other Ellie.  Sawyer and Juliet opt to go rescue the geek, while Locke goes to Old Otherton (not to be confused with New Otherton) to pick up his conversation with Richard.   Richard is understandably skeptical when Locke tells him that he’s his leader, but agrees to talk after Locke shows him the compass.  When Richard says the process of discovering their leader starts young, Locke tells him when and where he’ll be born in a couple of years, and says to look him up.  So now we know that the answer to “Why was creepy Richard standing outside baby Locke’s hospital room?” is “Because Locke told him to.”  Weird, eh?

Daniel tells Ellie that they should just bury the bomb in concrete and lead, and everything will be fine because, after all, the island is still there in 50 years.  Sawyer and Juliet show up to rescue him, just before another flash transmits the whole Scooby gang out of the 50s.

They bounce around several more times.  Each time, Charlotte gets a crazy nosebleed, and eventually so does everyone else.   Sawyer sees Kate deliver Claire’s baby from behind a bush, and keeps quiet till she flashes away.  Locke chooses not to go to his past self and tell him that the light that comes out of the hatch is just Desmond.  They jump to some undisclosed future date, to find the beach camp ransacked, and steal one of two outrigger canoes to try to make it to the Orchid station.

Locke thinks that if they get to the Orchid station, he can stop the flashes, which they’re pretty sure are going to kill them all otherwise.

After setting out in the canoe, they start getting shot at by some folks in the other canoe who are in hot pursuit.  Here’s a thought, gang.  If you’re going to steal someone’s canoe, at the very least, disable the other one so you can’t be followed.  I think this is the island version of letting the air out of the police car’s tires before jacking a car.   I can’t believe Sawyer, or possibly Miles, didn’t think of this.  They must be getting soft.

As they’re getting shot at, another flash takes them to a dark and stormy night.  Yes, it was a dark and stormy night.  How many times do you have a legitimate reason to write that?  But I digress.

In the same dark, stormy night, we see a life raft with a bunch of French people in it.  Or at least, a bunch of people shouting French.  I guess they could be Canadiens.  But since we’re pretty sure they’re Danielle Rousseau and her team, let’s just go with “they’re French.”

They see a body on some debris, which turns out to be an unconscious-but-not-dead Jin.  Who is even more confused than usual when he wakes up, because not only does he not speak French, he has no clue he’s in 1988.

Back in LA, Jack gets a call from Hurley, who is happily incarcerated away from Ben.   A guy dressed in scrubs tries once again to fill Sayid with tranquilizer darts, but this one’s not fast enough.  After Sayid takes him down, he, Jack and Ben (who arrived on the scene in the interim) discover Kate’s address in his pocket.  Jack calls Kate, who is staking out the lawyer who threatened to take away Aaron.

Sayid and Ben take off in a carpet cleaning van emblazoned with “Ranier-Canton” (an anagram for “reincarnation”), to see if they can spring Hurley.  Jack goes to meet up with Kate.

Meanwhile, Sun, who is babysitting Aaron for Kate, receives a package containing photos of Jack with Ben, and the Whitman’s Sampler – Guns n’ Chocolate Collection.

After a somewhat cool redirect, where we’re supposed to think that Claire’s mom is the one trying to lay claim to Turniphead, we discover she’s really just there for a settlement check from Oceanic, and just happens to have the same lawyer.

Mr. Attorney is a busy guy, because he then shows up in a parking garage to tell Ben and Sayid that the D.A. has no case against Hurley, and he’ll be released in the morning.  So any doubt we had that Ben is the one trying to steal Aaron from Kate is pretty much toast at this point.

Everybody meets up at Pier 23 (I guess Piers 4, 8, 15, and 42 were taken).  Jack once again breaks out his “We’ve gotta get the band back together!” pitch to Kate, who freaks out upon seeing Ben, and immediately pegs him as the one behind the legal maneuvering.  Jack starts to defend Ben, who interrupts him to say “Yeah, it’s totally me.  Sorry, Jack.”

Back on the island, Jin and Rousseau’s team decide to go to the radio antenna, and then from there to Jin’s camp, where he thinks Sun will be.  Before they get there, Smoky attacks the group and drags Montand down into a hole beneath some kind of ancient stone temple.  They try to keep him from getting pulled down, but the monster rips him away, leaving them all holding… (wait for it)… Montand’s arm.

YES!!!  I knew Damon and Carlton weren’t going to leave me hanging on that one!

All the team, except the pregnant Rousseau at Jin’s insistence, go in after armless Montand.  And then Jin disappears, and reappears a couple of months later, just in time to see Rousseau have to shoot her lover Robert.  Apparently, she didn’t just go nuts and kill her team like Sayid thought, because Robert totally did try to kill her.  But just as she told Sayid way back in “Solitary,” he didn’t notice she’d removed the firing pin.

I will now take a moment to mock all those who said the writers were making all this up as they went along and didn’t have a plan of some kind.  SET UP IN SEASON 1.  PAID OFF IN SEASON 5.  BOO-YAH!

Admit it.  You knew I’d start reviewing episodes of LOST here, eventually.

And if you’ve been watching all these past four seasons, you knew they were going to go the time-travel route. They’ve been hinting about it from Season 1.

And if you knew those two things were coming, then maybe you know more about the future than you think you do. Heck, maybe some nerdy tie-wearing scientist is going to tell you, at some future date, that all this was destined to occur.

And I’m sure you’ll look positively smashing in that Dharma jumpsuit and gas mask ensemble.

Now, let’s get on with it, shall we?

“Because You Left,” the first of the two episodes, picked up right where last season’s finale ended.  I’m going to treat it and “The Lie” as one long episode, for the sake of brevity and because it’s been two days and I can’t remember what was in each episode.  The very beginning shows the doctor from all the Dharma videos getting up and taking care of a baby, and then going to shoot another orientation film.  Some workers show up freaked out because where they’re drilling to build the Orchid station, the drill bits are melting and a worker is holding his head and wigging out.  Doctor Dharma tells them to stop drilling, because if they go one more centimeter, they’ll release “limitless energy” and “God help us all.”

You’d think they’d put a big “LIMITLESS ENERGY- DO NOT DRILL HERE OR GOD HELP US ALL” notation on the schematics and blueprints, but whatever. I’m guessing OSHA did not have jurisdiction over the Dharma Initiative.

Oh, and Doctor Dharma bumps into a worker on his way out who turns out to be tie-lovin’ physicist Daniel Faraday.

Back in L.A., Ben and Jack pack up dead Locke and his coffin. They head to the local Motel 6 to plan their elaborate strategy to collect the rest of the Oceanic 6 and shuttle them back to Mystery Island, and to put Jack through the fastest drug rehab program in history.

Jack: Where are my pills?
Ben: I flushed them down the toilet.
Jack: Cool. I was totally just about to do that.
Ben: I figured.

Congratulations, Jack! You’re now certified drug-free and ready to save the world from certain destruction! Moving on.

Kate gets a friendly visit from some attorneys (which is always a bad sign when you’re on probation for murder) and apparently they know that Aaron is not so much her biological son as a kid she ended up on a raft with in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Kate packs up Turniphead, looks longingly at a picture of Jack and Turniphead together, and becomes The Fugitive 2.0: Minivan Soccer Mom edition.

She stops at a Quik-E-Mart, and gets a call from Sun, who is in L.A. on business after getting detained briefly by Daddy Widmore, who gives her the verbal smackdown for disrespecting him in front of his business colleagues. (How dare she hand him a business card in broad daylight! The nerve!)

He asks her what their “common interests” are, and instead of going with the obvious answer of “Manipulating and lying to our loved ones, while secretly being scary as heck,” she says “Killing Ben Linus.” Okay. We’ll go with that common interest for now.

Hurley and Sayid, having just broken out of the mental institution and shot some guy who was parked outside with a gun, go to a “Safe House,” which a broken piece of Scotch tape over the door informs Sayid, is not so safe anymore.  He pulls out his awesome Iraqi ninja moves and kills the two assailants, one by flipping him off a balcony and one by tossing him onto an open dishwasher drawer where a wide selection of lovely Ginsu knives had been neatly placed, blades up.

(Note:  I don’t have a dishwasher, but if I did, I would henceforth ALWAYS put my Ginsu knives in it blades up, as it apparently makes an AWESOME lo-fi home security device.  Oh, and I’m putting Scotch tape over my door whenever I leave from now on.  You can’t be too careful.)

Sadly, before he completes his Ninja moves, one of the assailants shoots him a few times with tranquilizer darts, leaving Hurley to execute a fairly impressive fireman’s carry to their waiting minivan.  During all this, a bystander snaps a cell phone pic of Hurley holding a gun, and thus within 5 minutes, he’s wanted for triple-homicide.

Back on Craphole Island, Sawyer and Juliet try to calm down a freaked-out Rose, Bernard and the rest of the castaways because suddenly their entire camp just up and disappeared.  Daniel and his raft of refugees arrive in mid-freakout to not explain what’s happening, but to insist that they all go to the nearest man-made structure, which turns out to also be the nearest man-destroyed structure, the Swan Hatch.

On the way, Sawyer demands Daniel’s shirt (but not the tie), fails to get it, and slaps him into giving some kind of explanation of what’s going on.  Which is apparently, once Ben turned the frozen donkey wheel, either the Island started skipping around through time, or the castaways did.  Their camp didn’t disappear, it either hasn’t been built yet or is long-since destroyed.  They get to the hatch to find it un-exploded and still all full of Desmond.

Sawyer beats on the hatch back door, hoping to score some Dharma beer, but Daniel says to give up, it won’t work.

Oh, and they can’t go back and kill Hitler or anything like that, first of all because they’re not in Germany, and second, because you can’t change the past.  Supposedly.  But I’m a little skeptical about that because immediately after insisting they can’t change the past or the future, Daniel smacks on the door of the hatch after everyone leaves to go back to the beach, and tells Desmond, “Should you get rescued, go to Oxford and find my mom.”

Shortly after that, the castaways on the beach get attacked with flaming arrows, make a run for it, get separated, and then Sawyer and Juliet get attacked by what looked and sounded like WWII-era British military dudes.  Just before Juliet gets her hand chopped off to make a point,  Locke displays some of his awesome knive-throwing skillz from Season 1, and saves the day.

Prior to this, Locke had been running around all alone, wondering where the heck his new tribe of Others went, when he saw Eko’s drug plane crash and got shot in the leg by Ethan.

After another time skip, Richard of the dark eyeliner showed up, performed high-speed triage on the bullet wound, and handed John a compass so the next time they met, Richard wouldn’t also try to kill him.  Because the next time they meet, Richard won’t know who the heck John is.  Oh, and he tells him that the only way to save the island is to bring back the Oceanic 6, and to do that, John’s gonna have to die.  Bummer for you, man.  And then he disappears.

Back in the real world, or rather L.A., which I’m not sure qualifies as “the real world,” but anyway, Sun meets up with Kate and lays on a major guilt trip about leaving Jin to die.   And maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like she was suggesting that Kate ought to just kill those pesky lawyers.  Then she smiles sweetly and asks how Jack’s doing.  Maybe it’s just me, but if I were Kate, I would politely decline Sun’s offer of a playdate between Aaron and Ji Yeon.  Because Sun is acting, well, evil.

Jack is apparently still a little discombobulated from the high-speed rehab, but Ben tells him go home and pack his stuff, because he’s leaving this life and never coming back.  Jack is down with that, since what with the drug addiction, seeing dead people, breaking up with Kate, and suicide attempts, coming home wasn’t all he was hoping it would be.

Ben says he’s going to take Locke’s body somewhere safe, which seems odd to Jack, who says “He’s dead, isn’t he?” and Ben refuses to answer, which knowing Ben, is pretty much tantamount to saying “He’ll be up and dancing the Tarantella by Season 6.”

Hurley takes tranquilized Sayid to his parents’ house, after getting pulled over for driving erratically by the ghost of Ana Lucia, who tells him to get some new clothes, take Jack to someone he trusts, and stay away from the police.  Oh, and that Libby says “Hi.”  (I swear to God.  I did not make any of that up.)

Hurley gets his dad to take Sayid to Jack, since he’s sort of barely breathing and his mom mistakes him for a dead Pakistani on her couch.   While Cheech is delivering Sayid to Jack for some medical care, Hurley recaps what really happened after the crash to his mom, who says she believes him.

Jack calls Ben while working on Sayid, and tells him to go pick up Hurley.   But unfortunately, before he got hit by the tranquilizer dart, Sayid told Hurley that whatever Ben tells you to do, do the opposite.

So when Ben goes by to pick up Hurley, Hurley flings a Hot Pocket at him and then runs out into the street and turns himself in to the police.  So apparently, Sayid should have added “Unless the ghost of Ana Lucia tells you not to do whatever is the opposite of what Ben says, in which case just hold tight and wait for someone who’s not crazy to come by and tell you what you should do.”

This throws a major monkey wrench in Ben’s plans, apparently.  After dropping Locke’s body off with Jill the Butcher Shop Lady (not kidding about that, either) he goes somewhere to meet with Unusually Hostile Jewelry Store Lady from Desmond’s first little jaunt into the past.

She apparently has her own Dharma hatch in the basement, where she uses a pendulum and some 80’s era computers to calculate “Event Windows.”  She tells Ben he better figure out a way to get the O6 back to the Island in 70 hours, or “God help us all.”