Couch Tomato: 'Lost' Is Back. Any Questions?

| Print Post This | Like (0) | Comments (3)

Express' Arion Berger turns her critical eye to the latest episodes of "Lost."

WE'RE TWO NEW "Losts" in because, after watching last week's season premiere I spent the week freaking out over not only the revelations (and new questions, always with the new questions), but also the level of greatness this show achieves when it's good, Which isn't always. But this season is like, it's like food, chowing down on each scene, taking in everything, wanting to devour what's next.

Lessee: FutureHurleyin Los Angeles sees DeadCharlie and kills a lot of papayas on his way back to the nuthatch, where creepy "Mr. Abaddon" wants to relocate him but Hurley's not playing. FutureJack (pre-beard, who I guess is SuperFutureJack) sucks at basketball and wants Hurley to keep his mouth shut about what happened on the island, whatever that was, and Hurley has the good sense, again — why is this guy in a nuthouse? He's the only one with a brain — to refuse to promise a damn thing. DeadCharlie, looking all cleaned up and badass, tells Hurley the island wants him back, but Hurley's like, "Kill your own polar bears, man. I'm out." We know that six people made it back from island. We've seen only three.

Back in tropical paradise, Jack has made contact with the guys on the boat. The name "George" comes up a lot. The boat folk are less interesting rescuing the islanders than in chatting with Naomi. As you recall, Locke has heaved a knife (sorry; not a bullet) into Naomi and, when no one's looking, she crawls away, only to be discovered (by Kate) and die.

Desmond returns, tells Hurley that Charlie's dead, and in a touching scene, Hurley breaks the news to Claire.

Hurley gets well and truly lost and stumbles upon a cabin (!) containing, from what he can see through the dirty window, a man in a rocking chair, presumably Jacob, and a huge terrifying staring eye that suddenly appears in the window! (The ecstatic Internet weirdos agree, by the way, that the eye was blue — it is, upon a rewatching — and is therefore not Locke's. Ruh-roh.) Hurley stumbles away, spins around, heads away from the cabin, sees it again right in front of him, then sort of wills it away. Dang, it must be tough having a history of crazy on this island.

Locke (who has been shot by Ben. Remember? Me neither) wakes up a mass grave, and is coaxed into action by the ghost of Walt. Hi, Walt! Your dog is fine. Miss you!

And most importantly, the Losties break up into two groups — those who believe Charlie's dying message (and Ben's bleeding one) that the freighter crew is not friendly, and those who are all, "Rescue, yay!" From what I can tell, it's:

Jack's crew of trusting types: Jack the Science Guy; Kate, because ... Juliet, who may or may not know better than to trust Ben; Sayid, always a dab hand at following orders; Jin and Sun, who seem a little afraid of Locke; Rose and Bernard, who are a lot afraid of Locke; and for reasons I can't fathom, Desmond, who absolutely knows better.

And...

Locke's feisty rebels: Claire, looking out for Turniphead for Charlie's sake; Hurley, the one with good sense, remember; Rousseau, Alex and Karl, the happy family; and Sawyer, just to be bloody-minded. Members of each group end up returned to civilization, so this is interesting.

Jeremy Davies drops down from a helicopter and says, "Are you Jack?"

Gah! A whole week! I have to wait a week to hear, "Yeah. Who are you?" Oh, producers, how you toy with me.

OK, flashbacks for the helicopter crew of four, all of whom make it to the island safely. Jeremy Davies is Dan, a physicist who is as freaked out in his hairy flash-forward days as he is cagey on the island. (I think his is a flash-forward, at first. Hard to tell. Weirdos, help!) Zoe Bell is delicate, red-headed anthropologist Charlotte, who discovered the skeleton of a polar bear wearing a Dharma Initiative Hydra Station collar. In Tunisia. Miles (pictured at left) is a sort of freelance exorcist (he says his job is "taking soil samples," which, heh — funny) who uses Darth Vader's Dustbuster to do his unholy work. Nick Nolte's arrest picture is Frank, the crew's pilot. He was supposed to pilot Oceanic 815 and insists that the guy the news reports are calling the pilot wasn't, you see, the pilot. All of these could have been flash-forwards, actually.

Oh, yeah, those news reports: The plane and all passengers and crew are found in states of revolting decomposition at the bottom of the ocean. So, uh, there's that.

Locke's crew takes Charlotte hostage, to the intense interest of Ben. Jack's crew gets Dan and Miles. Then they get Frank, which is lucky for them, because Frank is an ace pilot, and the helicopter is fine.

Everyone beats up Ben a lot, which is always fun to watch. No matter how hard he gets wailed on, he never stops sassing/maniuplating/taunting his captors. Fabulous. Also, he knows exactly who Charlotte is and the fact that the helicopter — and possibly the freighter, not sure of their relationship yet — has come for him. Which we know from a scene in which the creepy Mr. Abaddon dispatches Naomi to oversee the helicopter crew and get Ben. Judging from the photograph he wields, it looks as if Ben went AWOL from his OfficeMax job and they really need someone to stock legal pads before tax season crushes them.

Oh, and Ben has "a man on the boat."

Jeezus. This is getting serious. My cockamamie theories are: The man on the boat is Michael (that phrase is so funny; I picture him like the little guy in the old Tidy Bowl ads, swirling around in the blue, blue toilet bowl) because Ben conscripted Michael to be the Others' agent last season, using Walt as bait. Maybe that's why Walt appeared to Locke, to warn him away from boarding his dad's traitor freighter.

The Dharma Initiative is bigger and more powerful and way better funded than anyone thought. They may have started their experiments in the North African desert, then found the island more convivial to their nefarious needs. I have no theory about why they need to cart poor, out-of-their element polar bears everywhere they go. That's just cruel. The Initiative also planted the fake plane, crew and passengers in the Indian Ocean, which is so not the Pacific, where the flight as we know it crashed.

What Jack doesn't want Hurley to blab about is the Jack-orchestrated massacre of surviving Losties, as foretold by Ben.

And the dead person? I got nothing. Please offer your own theories in comments!