SPOILER ALERT

* I really enjoyed this episode. It threaded a ton of needles with a slew of loose ends, all rather effortlessly I thought. On the Kate side, you found out what Sawyer whispered and got some movement regarding his ex and his daughter. You found out how and why Kate gave up Aaron. You got some resolution for Claire’s poor grandma/Christian’s poor babymama. And best of all you found out why Kate returned: to find Claire!

* This last part really made me happy because I just tend to like it when shows find a way to make a big deal out of smaller characters. Now one of our core players is on a quest to track down Ms. Stay Away From Me and the Bay-bee Chah-lie. Hopefully this will keep Kate busy enough not to fuck up Sawyer and Juliet and not get dragged into another thing with Jack. It also suggests that Claire’s status is going to become more central to the plot, which I appreciate. I do wonder whether this mean’s Aaron’s all that special after all, whether he’ll be back on the Island at some point or whether he’s just going to stay with Grandma, but hey.

* Meanwhile, on the Dharma/Others/Island end of things, you obviously see how and why Ben survives Sayid’s assassination attempt. You get another callback to the Temple and whatever the hell goes on in there, presumably some supernatural brainwashing process like what Rousseau believed the monster did to her crew. You find out that not only did Ben not remember Sayid, but you also find out why that’s the case–I assumed that he did remember but just hid it.

* And finally, of course, you get the big payoff moment between Ben and Locke. The look of panic on Ben’s face was almost as priceless as the look of confidence on Locke’s. Payback’s a bitch, I hope!

* When you think of the sheer number of balls this episode kept in the air, the sheer number of other episodes it referred back to, it’s really flabbergasting. Sawyer’s whisper, Sawyer’s conned ex-girlfriend, the surgery storyline from the part of Season Three that everyone but me hated, Ben’s first meeting with Richard, his mother’s death in childbirth, the oft-seen scene where Ben tells them they all need to go back, the Christian/Claire/Aaron lineage, the red herring with Mrs. Littleton and Ben’s lawyer, presumably Juliet’s history with Ben and that “you look just like her” line from the woman whose husband Juliet was schtupping, all the time-travel meta-discussion between Hurley and Miles, some mentions of Ellie and Charles running the show for the Others, Claire giving birth to Aaron, Claire disappearing, the big lie about 815, the fame of the Oceanic Six–if they’d somehow worked in Boone and Shannon, or Eko and Yemi, or the Adam & Eve skeletons and their black and white stones, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

* Heck, they even gave us a visual reference to that episode where Kate was married to the Joss Whedon guy by putting her back in a supermarket. Between those two episodes, I don’t know what it is about the lighting in grocery stores, but hubba hubba, Kate should go shopping more often.

* They’re also answering questions a lot faster than they used to, now that they know that they can. So we find out what happened to Kate and Aaron just a handful of episodes after that first became an issue, just like we learned how Sayid got arrested by big-haired lady, just like I presume we’ll find out how Hurley ended up on the plane before the season’s out too. But where I felt this the most was when they showed Richard walking into the Temple with Ben, where a couple of seasons ago he’d have just walked off and we’d be left wondering where he took him and what he did with him. I’ve always enjoyed the show no matter how long they left various mysteries out there, but this new economy of storytelling is pretty satisfying.

* Given the amount of superhero comics I read, this business about whether or not it’s right to kill Young Ben/let Young Ben die is the kind of thing I’ve thought about and talked about more than is perhaps healthy. Yet the show doesn’t dwell on it all that much–we’re clearly supposed to feel Jack is a dick for washing his hands of the affair, and we’re clearly supposed to think Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate are doing the right thing by trying to save his life, even if that means he’s going to make their lives a living hell 30 years later and murder dozens of people some time before that. The thing that’s tricky about this sort of story is that while the normal, real-world concept of preemptive strikes involves a degree of uncertainty, time-travelers or clairvoyants or whatever actually know what will happen if they don’t make their move. Sure, it’s cold-blooded to shoot a 12-year-old or leave him to die on an operating table, but it’s also cold-blooded to condemn a bunch of hippie scientists in jumpsuits to an agonizing death by chemical weapons–not to mention Ana-Lucia, Libby, the redshirts, everyone on the freighter, etc. When I hear commercials for that Wanted movie say “Kill one, save one thousand” I want to kill myself, but here it’s a more ethically dicey situation.

* Do you think we’ll ever see that stewardess who joined the Others again? Or the kids? That was kind of a big deal, wasn’t it? That image of the Others dragging the teddy bear along?

* I liked it when they cut to commercial on the tableau of everyone in the house after Jack refused to help Young Ben the same way I liked it when they cut to commercial on Sawyer’s smiling face after Juliet helped Amy give birth to Aaron: It was something different in terms of what they cut to commercial on. Usually you get a close-up on someone who just said or did (usually said) something shocking, or a close-up on the shocked face of someone who just heard or saw (usually heard) the other person say or do (usually say) something shocking. In the case of the Sawyer Smiles cut, he was reacting to good news, which almost no one ever gets on this show. In the case of this tableau, it was a group reacting, in long shot, to the shocking statement. It just makes me happy when you get a little difference like that–it shows that the people who make the show are still alert and kicking.

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