Watching Lost, I realized tonight, is like being repeatedly punched in the brain (not the head, but directly in the brain).

Not that I mean that in a negative sense.

Benjamin Linus is probably the most maddening character on television. Ever. EVAR.

And there’s no one I enjoy watching more (well, Fringe‘s Walter Bishop comes close, but for totally different reasons).

For this episode to center around Ben Linus was so long in coming and filled in so many freakin’ gaps, it’s wonderful.

To quickly recap what we learned:
• Ben didn’t remember what happened to him as a child (he knew that he was helped in the temple, it appears, but he could have been told that by Richard or Charles or anyone, really)
• Charles was forced to leave the island (by whom, exactly? That still wasn’t clear; I hope we get a Widmore flashback) because he left the island repeatedly and fathered a child with an “outsider.” (Which means that Ellie, whoever she is, is not Penny’s mother.)
• Rousseau was supposed to die (according to Richard) and so Alex should have, too. One could argue that Alex was, indeed, supposed to die, and so she did, in the end. She had to die because otherwise Ben never would have listened to Locke. And she wasn’t supposed to die until she did, because she wouldn’t have been able to strangle Ben and Ben wouldn’t have been as attached to Alex as he was (in part because he was feeling guilty about his causing her death).
• Locke is somehow utterly plugged into the island now, at least as much as Ben ever was.
• A bunch of other people on the plane were doing their damnedest to get to the island, too. Do they work for Widmore?
• We haven’t seen the last of Frank Lapidus, thank the Gods of Kobol.
• Richard Alpert seriously doesn’t age. He’s not like that because he’s jumping around in time. He looks exactly the same every single time.
• Smokey is somehow judge, jury and executioner and has been for a really, really, REALLY long time. Really long. Really. As in lots and lots of years, decades, centuries (millennia?).

What we still don’t know:
• Why Alpert doesn’t age. Is he the personification of Smokey? (I know that theory is all the rage, and it sounds more and more likely almost every day.) And, speaking of aging, why does Widmore appear to have aged far faster than anyone else? Or does it just seem that way because Alpert does not age and we keep seeing them together?
• What, exactly, is Smokey?
• What is the temple?
• How did Widmore travel back and forth to the island? We know about the Frozen Donkey Wheel, but that only shows how to leave the island.
• Why did Widmore leave the island in the first place (not when he was banished, but when he met Penny’s mom, etc.)?
• What happened to the Dharma village? It’s been abandoned far longer than the amount of time that’s elapsed since Alex was killed there. WHAT IS UP? WHEN are Locke & Ben & Sun?
• How are they going to get back to 1977? Or get the Losties from ’77 back to the present (or whatever time they’re in).
• How did Ethan turn from being Amy & Horace’s son into a willingly cold-blooded killer at such a young age? It’s more than just the Purge. Was he taken from his parents before the Purge? How did Ethan join the Others???

A last thought on tonight’s ep:

I almost jumped through the TV screen when they made us believe Ben killed Penny. It also gave a second dimension to the scene where he doesn’t kill Rousseau; the whole reason he can’t kill Penny is because she’s a mommy. He couldn’t kill Rousseau because she’s a mommy. His mommy died giving birth; no matter what he is, he can’t deny any child – any child – his or her mother. Even if that child never knows who her mother is (which Alex didn’t almost her entire life).

Nothing can stand between Desmond and Penny, so far as I’m concerned. NOTHING. You hear that Lindelof & Cuse??? YOU HEAR ME?????

Sorry, got a little carried away there.

Oh, and one more thing: Loved Ben sporting those floppy ’80s hairstyles. Way to rock a ‘do. How fashionable, despite being in the middle of nowhere.

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These two episodes were inextricably entwined and filled in so many gaps, it’s almost impossible to take them separately.

In “He’s Our You,” we found out why Sayid ended up on the plane to Guam (sort of, we still don’t know if it really was Ben who hired the bounty hunter to bring him there or if, perhaps, it was Widmore who was behind it – hmmm, hadn’t thought of that until this moment, actually)…

In “Whatever Happened, Happened,” we found out why Kate changed her mind and decided to go back to the island (sort of) and, more importantly, what the heck happened to Aaron.

And, perhaps most importantly, we learned how and why Ben became who he was.

The young Ben, as we’d already seen, hated his father and was miserable in Dharma-land because of it. His father was a grade-A a-hole, mean and unforgiving. But we saw that when his son’s life was on the line, he realized how he’d mistreated him. If Ben weren’t taken by the Others, who knows if they’d have been able to repair their relationship.

We’ve seen, however, that you can’t change the future or the past, no matter how hard you try. Maybe you change individual events (you don’t even know if you’re really changing them, because it’s all happening in your own present), but the end result is the same.

The timeline is set. If not, and Ben had died, Hurley was right – it would have created a temporal paradox and they would have vanished in a puff of logic (apologies to Douglas Adams).

But Ben couldn’t die. We knew that, because he was alive in the future. Not the Losties’ future, but Ben’s future. We saw it. It just so happened that was the Losties’ past. And because that had happened, Ben couldn’t die, no matter what Jack decided.

In fact, Jack was supposed to decide not to operate on Ben, ironically, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a reason to take Ben to Richard and the Others, which led to the purge and Ben’s leadership of the Others, and so on.

Obviously, Richard’s decision not to consult with Widmore (and Ellie) led to Widmore’s eventual expulsion from the island (did Widmore have to jump the island in time at some point? Did Ben trick him into jumping the island in time?) and Desmond ending up on the island and the plane crash and the Oceanic 6, and …

And so everything happened as it was supposed to happen. And whatever Richard does to Ben in the temple, he doesn’t remember, so that (very neatly) explains why he doesn’t remember any of this.

But Richard does, and feels responsible. Which is why he helps Locke out. It’s as if he’s trying to atone to the island for what he did with Ben, by helping Locke take over leadership by letting Locke know that his father is the one who caused Sawyer’s father to kill Sawyer’s mom and himself. Did I just give you a headache there?

I still want to know how Richard gets on and off the island, by the way.

The Jack-Kate-Sawyer-Juliet square is rather interesting, as we basically have Jack totally left out in the cold, with both Kate and Juliet mad at him and in love with Sawyer. But I think that Sawyer does truly love Juliet, and he went to save Ben not because of Kate, but because of Juliet. And Juliet felt so strongly about saving a little boy that she knew it was more important to send Sawyer after Kate than to keep them apart.

You could see the pain in her eyes as she told Jack that.

It’s an interesting dynamic, to see Jack so utterly being left out and considered, basically, useless. He’s boxed himself into this corner, though, and has no one to blame but himself.

The Hurley/Miles conversations were totally the comic relief of the night and I loved the entire conversation between the two of them, with Hurley finally, finally stumping Miles. Until a couple scenes later when we get the answer to the question of why Ben doesn’t remember Sayid shooting him. Though, honestly, how do we know Ben doesn’t remember that? Ben never gives anything away. Maybe he remembers Sayid shooting him and telling him that Ben is right, that he is a killer. Hmm? And so that’s why he says that to Sayid all those years later (or earlier, depending on whether you’re looking at it from Ben’s or Sayid’s perspective).

I was so afraid they were going to kill off Sayid, by the way. Glad they didn’t.

And, by the way, I loved the scene where Sayid tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and they all think he’s insane. Lucky for Sawyer, that.

So what are we left wondering?

• What, exactly, does Richard do to Ben in the temple?

• What, exactly, are the Others/Hostiles?

• What, exactly, is the Incident and why does it lead to the Purge?

• How/why, exactly, does Widmore get expelled from the Island? You’ve gotta assume that Ben is behind it.

• Why, exactly, am I writing “exactly” in each of these questions?

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OK, first off, does the fact that the flight number in the episode title bother anyone else? It’s not from the dreaded “numbers” and it doesn’t add up to a dreaded number. Bugging the crap outta me.

Just sayin’.

OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to admit that I considered yesterday’s ep to be a transition episode from the insanity we’ve been dealing with to the insanity we’re going to deal with.

We knew they were going to get back to the island; it was only a matter of time.

But yesterday raised more questions than it actually answered.

They are:

• WTF happened to Ben? Who’d he get in a fight with? Was it with one of Widmore’s thugs? Did it have something to do with Sayid being brought on the plane as a prisoner?

• Speaking of Sayid, why was he arrested and why was he being taken to … Guam? I’m assuming that because they had to mirror the original flight as much as possible, someone had to be in shackles, and it wouldn’t be Kate.

• Speaking of Kate, why did she change her mind? What did she do with Aaron? Why wouldn’t she tell Jack? Why did she sleep with Jack but then tell him on the plane that they weren’t together? (‘Cuz she’s going back to Sawyer?)

• Speaking of Jack, didn’t you just want to smack him upside the head and yell, “Open the damn letter from Locke already!?!?!?!?!?” I wonder why Mrs. Hawking didn’t want Ben and Sun to know about the letter?

• Speaking of Mrs. Hawking, why isn’t her last name Faraday? Why didn’t she seem at all surprised at Desmond’s message? Why did she tell Desmond he wasn’t finished with the island.

• Speaking of Desmond, how are they going to get him back to the island?

OK, I ran out of speaking ofs, but not questions:

• How did Hurley come to change his mind? And how adorably cute was it that Hurley bought all the vacant seats on the plane so no one else would die? Just wanted to hug him.

• Who laughed out loud when Frank said to Jack, “This plane’s not going to Guam, is it?” And is he going to end up on the island, too?

• Why did Jack, Kate & co. end up in such disparate places?

• Why was Jin wearing Dharma clothing and driving a brand-new Dharma VW van? Are they stuck in some Dharma time and so decided to blend in with the crowd, somehow? Or did they find another stash of Dharma stuff? And didn’t you think that Roger Workman was going to step out of that van? Or Ben?

• What happened to the rest of the plane and its passengers?

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