For a fleeting moment tonight, I thought that my beloved Lost was about to abandon the conceit that you cannot change the future, that what is going to happen is going to happen and there’s damn little you can do about it.

Did I mention how fleeting that moment was?

Remember, if you will, that Desmond tried to save Charlie multiple times. But no matter what he did, he could only change the circumstances – not the end result.

Have I mentioned yet that you shouldn’t read if you didn’t watch? No? Well, I have now.

We did have a bit of foreshadowing of Daniel’s death, when he told Jack that the present is the present and anyone could still die.

And I think it’s important to note that now everyone who came on the freighter is dead except for Miles. Even Abbadon is dead.

And, yet, Eloise knew that Daniel would die if he went back there. She claimed to Penny that for the first time, she didn’t know what was going to happen; is that true because her body of knowledge about what happened came from Daniel’s journal and now that he’d gone back to the island, he was dead and gone and nothing else would ever be written in it?

So if she knew she would be the one to kill Daniel if he went back to the island, why did she tell him to go? Did she believe that somehow it would be different this time? Did she just believe that was his destiny and so therefore he had to go, even though she would be responsible for his death? And Charles knew that Eloise would kill Daniel if they went back to the island; why did he send him there? Was he simply trying to save his son’s brilliant brain? Or did he, too, believe that destiny is destiny?

And if Daniel’s destiny was to end up back on the island, then it was destiny, too, for Jack & Kate to end up back there, because they’re the ones who took Faraday to his mommy. Who killed him.

By the way — I realized the second Eloise Hawking stepped on screen tonight that, of course, she was Ellie, and Widmore was Daniel’s father. Just curious, though, how she ended up with the last name Hawking and he with the last name Faraday, but I think that’s more Cuse & Lindelof screwing with the fanbase than anything else. They love to give the characters the names of famous philosphers and scientists, no?

But I ask this: At what point is a destiny truly a destiny and when is it the abdication of free will in favor of what you believe you must do?

If we are beholden to a destiny, then why do anything at all? If what’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what, then what’s the point? By now, I can’t really blame Jack for becoming an alcoholic. He’s being jerked back and forth by destiny. Destiny, she’s a bitch.

Laugh-out-loud moments of the night: It was all Sawyer tonight, first when he called Faraday “Twitchy,” and second when he asked Miles, “Is he still insane?”

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How totally awesome was it that the title came from a complete sub-sub-plot, wherein Hurley is writing a new and better script for Empire Strikes Back, one that negates the need for the Ewoks in Jedi.

We all know by now that there’s no way to change the future, so he is doomed to never get his script into George Lucas’ hands, or maybe something in his script even sparks the idea of Ewoks; but that’s one I suppose we’ll never know for 100 percent sure.

What we do know for 100 percent sure now, is something I predicted month and months (maybe eons!) ago: Dr. Marvin Candle (not his real name, but that’s how I always think of him) is Miles’ father.

Toldya.

Of course, that wasn’t too shocking once we knew Dr. Candle had a baby and realized all those recruited for the trip to the island had some sort of connection to it.

So this is the main question I have about Candle/Miles – did Marvin Candle do some weird experiments that led to his son having the ability to commune with the dead? Or was he born with the ability because he was born on the island? Either way, is that why his mom left his dad?

What we now know (besides Miles’ connection to Candle)
• Bram (the guy who was with Ilana on the Hydra island and knocked Lapidus out) is not working for Widmore. We do not, however, know who he is working for. Richard Alpert? In case you missed it, Bram is the guy who was explaining to Miles why he shouldn’t work for Widmore when they kidnapped him in the van, making him lose his fish taco. (I love Lost and its little injections of humor.) He and Ilana are in on something together, and it can’t be good.
• Hurley is fully aware he talks to and sees dead people. So his friend Dave was probably someone who died when that deck collapsed that Hurley went on, which would explain why he was seeing him in the mental hospital. Charlie is, therefore, indeed dead. Means Jacob probably is, too. And I’m thinking this finally answers the “is he or isn’t he” question about Christian Shepard. (For the five people who didn’t think he was dead.)
• Why Miles asked Ben for $3.2 million – it was twice as much as Widmore’s folks were paying him. He’d asked Bram for the same amount, and they turned him down. Maybe he was trying to see if Ben was in with Bram? OK, so maybe we don’t know EXACTLY why he asked for $3.2 million, but we know basically why.
• There is indeed some sort of crazy magnet on the island that could cause someone’s filling to shoot through their skull like a bullet. But I thought the magnet was near the Swan, and they had to bring the body all the hell over the place to get there. The Others seem to be fully aware of this crazy magnet, seeing as the spot where the redshirt was killed was off-limits to Dharma folk.
• Hurley is the coolest person EVER.
• Faraday’s not on the island anymore, and that’s why we haven’t seen him in a while. Oh, wait, he IS on the island now, seeing as he JUST ARRIVED FROM ANN ARBOR. Sorry for shouting, but if you didn’t jump out of your chair at that last scene, well, then, you’re just not a real Lost fan.

What we don’t know (still and new stuff)
• Who Bram and Ilana are working for. It ain’t Widmore, and I don’t think it’s Ben. Though Ben’s, “let me know if I can help” offer to Ilana and Bram could have been a code. They might be Others.
• What the significance is of Bram’s question to Miles: “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” It seems that would be Smokey, but Miles doesn’t know that.
• Um, where’s Sayid?
• What’s going to happen to our Losties now that there’s evidence of them taking Ben out of Dharmaville to Old Othertown?
• What’s up with Faraday? We have to wait for two weeks to get his story, find out how he got off the Island in 1977 and over to Ann Arbor, where the Dharma Initiative apparently is based, where he’s considered some sort of expert on the island. Shockingly (not).

And here’s my brain-twistingly painful question about Faraday: Is the Faraday in the future who is basically crazy and sees the crashed plane on the news the future version of the Faraday who stepped off the submarine?

By that, I mean to say that I think Daniel Faraday is trapped in a time loop. How else would he know that Des was his constant? Sure, he met Desmond back in his lab with the time-traveling mouse, but how would he have known then that Desmond would be on the island? Or that when the island went back in time, he could find Desmond on the island, and where?

Future Daniel is Daniel. He is in a time loop and is all crazy in the future because of all the events he’s set in motion. He’s found, though, that he can’t prevent any of these events from happening and just tries to mitigate it every time.

I think that Daniel knew damn well that he’d told Charlotte never to come back to the island. I think that he tries a different tack each time he’s there. I think he tries to save Charlotte, but is never able to, and he doesn’t even try to escape the time loop until he finds a way to save her.

There, I just thought that up right here and now as I was typing it.

Let’s see what happens.

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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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