* I enjoyed seeing Ana-Lucia…and then seeing Hurley ignore her “stay away from cops” edict in the end
* What was the package that Ben pulled out of the wall of the hotel room and did not want Jack to see?
* At first I was excited to see Frogurt finally (he was in a mobisode, I think). And then he was a whiny little girl, and I was sick of him. And then he got a FLAMING ARROW IN THE CHEST! My impression was that at that point they had moved to a post-Purge, post-Nigerian plane, pre-815 point. So who the heck were the guys with arrows and (later) guns? They didn’t look like DHARMA uniforms and they should all be dead. Also, it seems as if the times between jumps are getting shorter, but maybe that’s a false impression, or maybe it’s a random effect.
* Ben does not look surprised at all when Jack informs him that Mr. Reyes delivered Sayid to him. Yet another long con by Ben?
* Sadly, it appears as if Jin really is dead. Too bad.
* One of the best scenes in the history of Lost was between Hurley and his mother, as he attempted to explain why they were lying. It was meta-awesome, I guess you could say. And the Expose shoutout was good too.
* This episode was better than the first, and it had the jaw-dropping last scene to fit the part. Of course when you see someone scribbling equations on a chalkboard, your first thought is Faraday. But Ms. Hawking and Ben in cahoots is awesome. And they only have a seventy-hour opening to return to the island. Are the Others somehow “time masters”, able to move through time? It would explain Alpert, it would explain why Hawking and Ben are chummy, and it would explain why only Locke and company are jumping around in time, not the Others. And it would also explain how the compass can “already belong to Locke” in the Alpert test scene from “Cabin Fever”.
* Something I over looked in discussing 5x01: in a previous post I discussed some season premiere trends that could be a guide as to what we would see tonight. One that I should have pointed out but did not was that there is often deception as to who we are watching until the last possible moment. Season 2 did this with Desmond in the Hatch--he could have been man, and we didn’t really see him until the last scene of the whole episode. And Season 4 did it with Hurley during his car chase. Although they tipped their hand with the Camaro, when he was wearing the jean jacket, it seemed as if they were trying to make it look like it might be Kate. And tonight, my first thought was that it was Ben in bed and that he was trying to play house in the real world. But how much better that it was Marvin Candle err Mark Wickmund err Edgar Hallowax err Pierre Chang.
