A Primer/Recap of Season 1-5 if you need it.

This made me laugh.

Reunited and it feels so good

Finally.
After so much teasing and so much leading up to it, we've finally got some major intersections that really indicate what we all know - the sprint is on for home plate.
First, we've got the paths of the Earth 2 Losties increasingly coming together and overlapping. You know that in an episode or two we're going to have the scene of everyone - or at least the candidates - standing around sort of looking at each other, wondering what the heck they do next as they remember their lives on island. I imagine it being in a warehouse.
Second, we briefly had a shot at having all the Oceanic survivors finally back together until Jack jumped ship.
And thirdly, we had the loooong Sun/Jin separation storyline finally come to a bit of an awkward end - I expected a little more emotional resonance with the thing. Though maybe that's how real life would be anyhow - a bunch of people standing around awkwardly while two people embrace near a sonic pylon.
We got some good solid answers on the Smoke Monster Impersonation deal, that he can only take on the form of dead folks. So that was him as Christian Sheppard. And that was him as Yemi, talking to Eko. Interestingly, that was NOT Smokey as Walt in those times we saw the Walt sightings around the island.
And I can't take credit for this insight, I read it online, but now we see why it was important, according to the psychic, for Claire to raise Aaron - here we had been going along thinking it was for Aaron's sake. But really it was for Claire's, as she's gone relatively batpoo insane. Though there also might be some hope for her redemption, it seems, as she's going along with the Losties instead of Locke. (And credit for best line of the night, as usual, goes to Sawyer: "Who the hell is Anakin?" Game, set, match, Lost writers).
So Smoke Lock promised he'd return dead Nadia to Sayid? We know Jacob said he cannot raise the dead - he told that to Richard back in the 1800s. So either A) Smoke Locke and Jacob have very different abilities (which seems somewhat likely since we have no reason to believe Jacob could also become a deadly cloud of smoke) or B) Smoke Locke is lying to Sayid with the thinking that 'hey, once I get off the island, none of what I promise these doofwads matters.' Which seems likelier.
Meanwhile, I'm increasingly convinced that Jack must be the likeliest Jacob replacement. If all the Losties are needed to get off the island, why has Smoke Locke taken a particular interest in Jack, going off into the jungle to talk to him specifically (in a nice parallel to the constant confrontations that were going on early in the series between Jack the Self Appointed Leader Who Was Having None of This Faith and Numbers Entering Crap and Locke.
And did the Widmore folks pull guns on the Oceanic crew because Jack was not there? Or was the whole "Deal's off" thing just how it always was going to play out? (On a side note - I'm really looking forward to the point when Widmore's henchwoman Dirty Tina Fey gets shot or kicked in shin or something. She's a jerk).
Your thoughts?

Lost-tacular

I love Lost, don't get me wrong. But the series finale being a five-hour TV extravaganza? With a two-hour retrospective, the two-hour finale, and a special, Lost-centric edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live? That's a lotta Lost.

Mom always said never play with dynamite in the house

To revert to my Ohio roots, yee-haw, son, that was a heckuva ride. The "Everybody Love Hugo" episode (only five left!) was a heaping mess of TV fun. You had Illana go kablooey. You had the return of Michael and Libby. You had Fake Locke cold bloodedly take out Desmond (ahades of when Ben shot Real Locke and left him for dead in that pit of dead Dharma folks back oh so long ago).
And interestingly, you had the scenes from next week's Lost, "The Last Recruit," accompanied by a snippet of dialogue from the uber creepy, out of control boat ride in the 1971 classic "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." Which is a nice parallel in some ways to the direction the show is taking this season - Willy Wonka being all about finding a replacement and testing recruits as they go through this psychedelic, increasingly elaborate freakshow of a place. And like that boat ride, where the boat seemingly is speeding out of control heading to doom while increasingly disturbing images flash in the background, the climax of Lost seems to be heading in the same direction, with things spiraling out of control and heading to disaster before, soon, they pull to a stop and all is revealed.
And speaking of reveals, so now we know those whispers are the spirits of dead folk caught in an island limbo (thus making those protestations from the show creators a couple seasons back that the Lost folks are not dead and in the afterlife technically true but a bit misleading).
We see the evolution of our Earth 1 Losties, as Jack is embracing his new role as Not the Guy In Charge Fixing Everything, a mantle Hurley is picking up.
I think Ben hit the nail on the head when he said that the island seemingly was done with Illana, and thus she got a big sendoff. Interesting sidebar question - is the Island some kind of entity like Smoke Locke or Jacob? Is it a consciousness as well? Whose side is it on?
Another side question - we see Chang at the opening of Hurley's wing at the natural history museum in Earth 2. Wasn't he killed by the nuke going off back in 1977? How exactly can he be here?
Favorite scene, though, must be Earth 2 Hurley drowning his sorrows not at a bar but over a bucket of fried chicken. Can't be any worse for you than a bottle of bourbon, one supposes.
A close second was Desmond's relative calm serenity whether he's deep in the jungle in what should be an "oh fudge" kind of moment when someone gives the equivalent speech of the "we're miles from where anyone could hear you scream" chestnut or whether he's running down a handicapped guy in a wheelchair with his car. And was that move supposed to kill Earth 2 Locke (and if so why) or to trip his memory of Earth 1 (and if so, surely there's an easier way to do it. I mean, near death worked for him and Charlie in bringing back their memories, but criminy, it only took some kissing or a TV commercial for Hugo and Libby. Seems a wee bit unfair in a grand scheme of things kind of way, no?)
So once these Earth 2 Losties all realize what's up, what then? Hop another Oceanic 815 flight perhaps simultaneously as some big electromagnetic pulse is being unleashed on Earth 1 by Widmore and crew?
What'd I miss? Your thoughts?

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Much apologies for the delay in this week's edition. We here at Lost Talk Central have been so transfixed by the bizarre train wreck that is the new Tiger Woods Nike ad and by noisy neighbors (his name is Tray) that a lot of things have fallen by the wayside.
So this week is housekeeping week, catching up on reader mail.
Doug from Fairborn, Ohio, writes: So what, now Desmond is going to try to convince the Earth 2 Losties to revert to their original destinies?
I think you've hit the nail on the head, Doug. We see now that Earth 2 - which we knew to be the world where things were slightly different from ours - is actually a sort of time-warped mistake, as if Biff had gotten his hands on a sports almanac from the future and became super rich and Marty had to go back in BttF II and get that almanac. The interesting corner the writers have put themselves in (and let's face it, that's what we always enjoy the most in our entertainment, that "how is Indiana Jones/Elinor Dashwood/Navin Johnson going to get out of THIS one?" moment) is to see how exactly that's going to happen. I mean, in 1977 an atomic bomb went off on the island, meaning no Oceanic 815 crash and seeming no island, even. That's a pretty tight corner to write your way out of, knowwhutimsayin'?
Marv from Boca Raton, Fla., writes: How'd you like them parallels?
Marv, you know us here so well. If nothing else, we're suckers for references and allusions, from Charlie's open hand in the car which resulted in Flashsideways Desmond's flashback to Charles Widmore offering Desmond the aged Scotch that in another life he denied him. We also dug seeing Daniel Farraday as a weird twitchy musical impresario instead of a weird twitchy physics genius.
And wasn't it awesome that the slight hints we've had that the two universes are not completely separate now are a full-throated scream as evidenced not just by Charlie, Daniel and Desmond but also by Eloise still playing her role as time cop (at one poitn chiding Desmond for some unnamed 'violation'), writes Beverly of Boulder?
Damn straight, Bevs. Even the ultimate aggravation of this show - to be chock full of questions and mysteries and then in the final season add a whole new layer of questions atop that - is still a constant hoot and frankly I don't care about the illogicality of it half the time, the characters and Easter eggs and little moments (like seeing Charles Widmore finally get smacked around a bit like he was trespassing on Clint Eastwood's lawn) make it all the worthwhile.
Dennis of Chicago writes, so if Smokey gets off the island, everything ends. But couldn't he have gotten off the island in Earth 2, after the bombing, so why is everyone there still alive?
Excellent question we here have been pondering awhile, Dennis. Hopefully someone answers this at some point.
The show has got a lot of balls up in the air right now - Smokey and his posse trying to get off island, Widmore having some plan to use the pockets of island electromagnetism to keep him there, Desmond having some tragic destiny to play in that Widmore plan, the bleeding over from Earth 2 to Earth 1, Earth 2 Desmond trying to round up the Losties to tell them something ... And we've only got a few episodes left. Tick tick tick.