SPOILER ALERT – SORRY I FORGOT TO ADD IT LAST WEEK BUT I IMAGINE YOU ALL KNOW THE DRILL AT THIS POINT

* Another delightful episode. It literally filled me with delight. I can’t remember exactly when–I think it was when Sawyer told Jack, Kate, and Hurley “It’s 1977”–but at one point I just leaned back and laughed, I was having such a swell time.

* With that in mind, I wish the episode were twice as long as it was. As it stood, it was an unusual episode in that there were no big revelations or dramatic reversals or other big moments. It was more a series of necessary conversations and events to bring various characters up to speed and establish a new status quo among the various groups. What happens to Jack/Kate/Hurley? What happened to Sayid? How did the Ajira plane land? Where did Frank and Sun go? How did Ben get injured? How do Sawyer and Juliet react to the return of their previous love interests? How does Jin find out about Sun’s return, and what does he do about it? How does Miles handle it? Now we know the answers to all those questions and we can move on from there.

* The episode also threw in a bonus answer or semi-answer here and there for questions we weren’t expecting the answers to just yet. For example, we learn that Horace and Amy’s baby is everyone’s favorite doctor-slash-killing-machine, Ethan. This led to maybe one of the greatest moments in the history of the show, where Juliet finds this out and her “aww wook at the widdle baby” facial expression curdles as though she just realized she’s holding the world’s most adorable giant maggot.

* We also get some more hints as to the origin of the uber-important Pearl station, as the long-rumored Radzinsky (who made the blacklight map on the blast door in the Pearl hatch) appears and is revealed as a bit of a paranoid who is apparently responsible for designing the Pearl in the first place.

* And we also discover that Young Ben Linus is in fact roaming around Dharma Village during Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel’s back-in-time sojourn there–though that then raises the question of how the time-displaced characters have been handling that bit of awkwardness.

* And oh yeah, where’s Daniel at?

* This episode also deftly managed multiple tonal shifts. You had the light ’70s-spoof comedy that happens any time we go back to the Dharma days. You had the interpersonal drama of Our Heroes and Heroines meeting up once again. You had the Season Two/Three capture-and-interrogation throwback storyline with Sayid and Jin. You had the Season One throwback storyline with the new castaways in the present day (one assumes). You had Frank’s pulse-pounding and heroic Sully Sullenberger moment. You had some really creepy moments in abandoned New Otherton with Jack’s ghostly dad. You had Scheming Sun, which gave me another favorite moment–Sun braining Ben with a paddle in a long-overdue act of comeuppance. (I always love it when Ben gets caught with his pants down.) This show can do a lot of things well.

* As far as false notes go, the only one that stuck out to me was Sawyer’s sudden upbraiding of Jack during their brief conversation at the Sawyer/Juliet residence that night. I know Jack is overbearing (to say the least!), and I know his comment about reading a book was out of line, and I know that the two have a history of pissing contests, but a) we’ve just established that Sawyer is a much more mature and content guy, and seeing him revert to form so quickly felt wrong; b) poor Jack just went from pill-popping, banned-from-the-hospital mess to desperate rescue-mission organizer to time-traveling Dharma janitor in the space of a few days–cut him some slack, James!

* As far as I’m concerned, the Castaways straight-up murdered that co-pilot. They all got on the plane knowing what could happen, and his blood is on their hands. I hope the show directly addresses how many people have died so that these clowns could have their little adventures, and does so in a way where there are actual emotional consequences for that, rather than a lecture from a bad-guy character that can be quickly shaken off and forgotten.

* I hope we don’t see a whole lot of “John Connor sending his own father back in time to conceive him”-style time travel paradoxes, but after reading Todd VanDerWerff’s excellent-as-always review/recap, I wonder if Ben and the Others were building that runway in Season Three specifically so Frank could land on it in the future.

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