SPOILERS ON THE MARCH

* The one-two punch of 9/11 and The DaVinci Code really did a number on my longstanding love of arcane conspiracy-theory stuff, but apparently that was nothing a crazy old British lady using a Foucault’s Pendulum to find a hidden magic island in a secret chamber beneath a church decorated with a painting of Doubting Thomas couldn’t fix.

* Speaking of: must be the season of the infodump.

* Recreating the opening of the pilot episode reminded me how brilliant the opening of the pilot episode was. I remember going to a screening of that thing at the San Diego Comic Con simply because Dominic Monaghan was going to be there and The Missus had a crush on him–we had no idea what to expect, and frankly we weren’t expecting much. (“From the creator of Alias“–whoopedy-dee). Then bam, a handsome man in a suit wakes up in the jungle, with no clue where he was or how he got there (at least at first). That, of course, is exactly how the audience felt. Sucked in from the get-go.

* Why do they keep having characters ask Ben questions? Nine times out of ten, he’s lying, as the show itself pointed out tonight. It’s not just a problem for his fellow characters, it’s a problem for the viewers, since every thirty-second q&a with Ben is a total waste of time beyond the “it’s fun to watch Michael Emerson act” factor (which I admit is pretty high).

* There’s something about this episode I can’t quite put my finger on, something about the pacing. I want to say…the pacing felt like a series premiere, but the the material felt like a season finale? Like, it was slightly laconic, easing you into what was going on the way an introductory episode was, but everything that was happening had been built up to for a couple years now the way a finale would be? It was an odd viewing experience. I liked it.

* Interesting color scheme at times, too–unusual for Lost. I really liked that blue light on Jack’s face in the airport bar, for example.

* There was something profoundly fucked up about all of these people, except Desmond, risking the lives of everyone else on that plane in order to save them and their friends, or give their lives a sense of purpose, or whatever. (Hurley at least tried, but dude, the stewardesses are fucked regardless. And Jack, seems like you asked about the other people on the plane a wee bit too late, considering you were already in the air, dickhead.) There’s two ways of looking at this, I suppose: One is that the writers ignored this and want you to ignore it too, except in the very broad “Hurley is good because he cares, Ben is bad because he doesn’t, Jack is basically good but kind of a dick because he only sort of cares” strokes they painted it with. The other is that the writers know it and want you to know it too, that they want to convey that all these people are profoundly damaged and selfish.

* Well, how about this, the show coughs up some mysteries we’ll have to learn about in flashbacks, Season One style! How did Hurley find out about the flight, why was Sayid under arrest, what happened to Ben down by the docks (okay, that one’s not so big a mystery, but they’ll still need to fill in the gap), what happened to Aaron, etc. I dig it.

* I also dig Evangeline Lily’s tore-up-from-the-floor-up performance in this episode. I definitely believed that whatever happened to her and Aaron was rough. That big open-mouthed kiss was sexy, too, though I kind of think the unexplained disappearance of a child would be a mood-killer for me.

* It’s a little wonky to cook up all this pseudoscience with electromagnetism and equations on the one hand, then insist upon something as manifestly unscientific as “recreating the conditions of the original trip to the Island” just by assembling five of the flight’s original 128 passengers, plus a dead guy in another dead guy’s shoes.

* Seems like the “next week on Lost” blew a little too much information, no? Too much for my tastes anyway.

* Also seems like we’re getting some new cast members in the form of Sayid’s handler and “my condolences” guy.

* I don’t care how easy it was to see Frank Lapidus’s return coming, it still put a mile-wide grin on my face.

* Indeed, I found myself chuckling throughout the episode, in honor of a job well done.

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