SPOILER WARNING

* A lot to swallow. Maybe too much? Maybe they should have just done an hour? Not that I’m complaining, really, but it was a little hard to get a handle on any kind of “story unit” flow because it was two separate episodes crammed together rather than a two-hour premiere. The breakneck pace established now that we’ve done away with flashbacks and flashforwards and are doing all-plot episodes contributes to the feeling that we’re just seeing a lot of stuff happening.

* Last night I told a friend that I thought a lot fewer people were going to complain about the show dividing the cast this time than they did during the beginning of season three, because this time both halves of the story were so crazy and action-packed. But sure enough, there’s someone on my Tori Amos board complaining about how boring the Sayid and Hurley stuff is. You really can’t please everybody!

* My one beef/quibble/beefquibble with the time-travel storyline is that it would have been nice if, like, back in season two or something, we’d had maybe one random encounter between a character and a time-anomaly version of someone. Heck, even that same character, perhaps. I mean, maybe we HAVE, but it wasn’t anything obvious. I’m mentally comparing it to a scene from Savage Dragon where the Dragon suddenly flashes forward into a post-apocalyptic future, and his as-yet-unborn son wearing a space suit appears to him and says “Dad?”, and it wasn’t followed up on for literally YEARS. I’d like for something like that to have happened relating to the time-travel storyline much earlier in the show–something that really stuck out, like Libby showing up in Hurley’s asylum, but then they don’t explain it for season after season. Trying to shoehorn it in after the fact–as with Faraday’s meeting with Desmond, which Desmond had never been shown to remember until last night–doesn’t cut it.

* Now that I think about it, it seems reasonable to assume that the mysterious eye that peers out of Jacob’s cabin’s window the second time Locke goes to visit it is in fact Locke himself. So maybe I’ve got nothing to complain about. But that’s something we’ve all filed away in the “Jacob’s cabin is crazy” file, not the “time travel paradox” file. Also, I’m hearing people say that maybe the whispers are the sound of people elsewhere in the time stream, and that when Locke initially discovered the crashed plane he had a flash-vision of the actual crash and then inexplicable leg pain, which would seem to connect to his Billy Pilgrim routine last night, so there’s that stuff too, I suppose.

* It’s good to see Sun becoming a cold-hearted bastard because she’s always been a bit annoying and she’s always had that side to her personality. And I was pleasantly surprised to see her stick the knife in Kate over her “I’ll go get Jin” move on the freighter, which I had totally forgotten about but at the time was like “Way to go get Jin there, Freckles.”

* I liked seeing Ana Lucia, and I liked the shout-out to Libby and the unspoken remembrance of Eko and his brother with the plane crash (even though Locke’s mental associations with it would most likely be the death of Boone and Charlie’s heroin addiction, at least WE can remember Eko and his brother). I like it when the show acknowledges the existence of the non-Bernard Tailies and acts as though that whole storyline actually made a difference even though it really didn’t. I hate when external factors like negotiations with actors and scheduling conflicts and so on force changes on the storyline–the actor who played Eko not wanting to live in Hawaii anymore, for example, or the rumor that Libby and Ana Lucia’s DWIs hastened their departure. And I always assume that otherwise unexplained gaps in the story in terms of actors playing a part and then disappearing are related to such external concerns–the stewardess who joined the Others, the tribunal Other woman who the creators now claim died during the Others’ ill-fated attack on the beach camp even though we never saw her, why they’ve taken so long to follow up on Libby’s story, why Michelle Rodriguez didn’t show up again until now, why Eko hasn’t made any more cameos, whether Matthew Abbadon is now stuck in Fringe purgatory and won’t be coming back–and it drives me fucking nuts. So yeah, happy for all the Tail Section-related stuff last night.

* Always happy to see Rose and Bernard, too.

* Now that we’ve firmly established time travel as a phenomenon, who do we think are the Adam & Eve skeletons with the white and black stones that Jack and Kate discovered in the caves way back when? A friend of mine assumed it was whoever discovered them, since that would be the most poetically fitting thing. But the fact that it was Jack and Kate who discovered them makes that seem unlikely to me because a) I think the Sawyer/Kate couple will end up prevailing, not Jack/Kate; b) I’m not convinced that they’re gonna let their main characters die on the Island, whether through foul play or because they stay there voluntarily and die of old age or whatever. So who is it? Jack and Kate? Sawyer and Kate? Jack and Juliet? Desmond and Penny? Ben and his mysterious disappearing childhood girlfriend? Daniel and Redhead Woman whose name I can’t remember ever? Rose and Bernard?

* Do you think there are any mysteries they’re just not gonna get around to explaining by the end of the show? Like how they consigned the Numbers to that stupid ARG and are now just kind of pretending that was never a big deal?

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