Thursday, February 12, 2009

Here comes sickness

A character dead! An arm ripped off! A compound leg fracture! Awesome awesomeness all around in last night's ep.
So what'd we learn?
1) Farraday's mom knows more than anyone else, including Ben, what actually is going on. Raising new, bigger questions of who the heck is she.
2) The sickness Rousseau referred to wayyyyyy back in season one has something to do with exposure to the smoke monster, and is seeminlgy not the same as the time distortion sickness that we're seeing on the island or that the freighter crew was suffering from. (The three Frenchies who were down in the lair seemingly turned evil in some way, while young Rousseau never went down there thanks to time jumping Jin.) While it doesn't really raise new questions, the reappearance of Smoky does renew old questions of what the heck it is and why it killed Eko (and now Frenchy Nadine) and so on.
(A Rousseau reminder, she told us long ago the other people who got shipwrecked on the island got some kind of sickness and she had to kill them. Just as we saw. But who wasn't sure for a second that it was going to turn out she was the nutjob instead of her husband?) So why didn't she remember Jin, 16 years later? Even with the passage of time, you'd think you'd recall a disappearing Korean guy.
3) So CHarlotte - as we suspected - had been on the island in the past - in this case, in her childhood. And we suspect Miles has as well, most likely as the baby seen in that Marvin Kendle flashback scene. So does Farraday also have an island history? Perhaps Mother Hawking is an Other?
4) So now we know how Ben knows things have gone awry on the island since he left - he heard it from Locke before Locke died. But how were things to be better if it was Locke, and not Ben, who moved the island? Why wouldn't the net results be the same? And speaking of Locke moving the island, we either now have a situation where Locke - sometime in the distant past - is now back on the mainland or, more likely, he is on the mainland in our present. Which seems to lack a logical consistency. If he moved the island in, for example, 1600 AD, why would he show up in 2007? Also, if the island folks got unstuck when the island moved through time/space, why wouldn't they be 'stuck' again in a fixed point since Ben moved the island? (We know they're not because Farraday has yet to encounter lil' Charlotte or to get a hardhat job with the Dharma Initiative).
Heres hoping that next week Mama Hawking has some answers before my head hurts much more.