(Get a full recap of the episode at the official Lost site. This spoiler-laden discussion assumes you've seen last night's episode.)

Damn J.J. Abrams anyway. Lost has returned, that "two-hour season premiere" turned out to be one hour of previously-on clips and one hour of new stuff. That new hour only added to the pile of unresolved mysteries and unanswered questions. But I'm hooked again anyway.

Okay, so Hurley likes to drive fast in old General Lee-looking Camaros. Maybe that's not such a surprise. But why is he yelling, when the cops finally catch him, "I'm one of the Oceanic Six!" We're obviously in a flash-forward, after their rescue, because the cop who interrogates Hurley makes a reference to the survivors being celebrities, and that he knew Ana Lucia, knew that she was on Flight 815 (A coincidence? Or all part of the master plan of the evil Matrix or whatever that has Our Heroes in their grip?). Plus, later, after Hurley has been tossed into a mental hospital -- which he wanted, considering that he's been seeing the ghost of Charlie on a regular basis -- Jack comes to see him, and they clearly know each other and talk about the island.

The most interesting stuff happening in this episode -- or the most annoying stuff, depending on how frustrated the show is making you -- is in the Hurley flash-forwards. Did only six people make it home? We've already counted Jack and Kate, and now Hurley, so who else? (I had been thinking it was someone from the island, maybe Sawyer, in that coffin that Jack visited at the deserted funeral home in last season's finale. But if the survivors are celebrities, then the newspaper article that alerted Jack to this person's death would have been much bigger, and the funeral home wouldn't have been deserted.) And isn't that Juliet in the background in the yard at the mental hospital, when Hurley is talking to the ghost of Charlie? Ages ago, we saw a flashback in which Juliet was in the same hospital as Hurley... except now I'm wondering if that wasn't actually a flash-forward. We've only assumed we were seeing the past, weren't we?

So Hurley sees the same spooky (imaginary?) shack and the man in the rocking chair that Locke saw, and that seemed to finally drive Locke over the edge of sanity. I think it's J.J. Abrams in that chair, taunting his cast, too. "Ha, ha, you're all puppets at my mercy!" I wonder if there's a clause in their contracts indemnifying Bad Robot against insanity amongst the cast...

Oh, and why did the Haitian from Heroes come to see Hurley in the hospital? Is it maybe because Charlie's not really dead, and the Oceanic Six is really the Oceanic Seven, and that needed to be erased from Hurley's memory? (And now it'll need to be erased again.) But wait: who are the "they" who need Hurley's help? Did some people stay behind on the island? Wouldn't Hurley have been one of them, since he sided with Locke on that stay-behind, don't-get-rescued decision?

Arrrrggghhhhh!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
reviews, reviews, reviews! at FlickFilosopher.com

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