SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

* I’d like to get this part out of the way so that I never, ever have to think about it again: I’d imagine that episode is really going to upset the portion of the audience that wants SERIOUS ANSWERS. Of course, the answer to anything supernatural is ultimately “because magic.” But for people to whom this show is a code to be cracked or a puzzle to be solved, any explanation for its various supernatural phenomena that uses phrases like “life, death, rebirth, the source, the heart of the Island” can’t possibly be good enough, because it doesn’t allow you to put the puzzle down, secure in the knowledge that you’ve solved it. Not to get on one of my nerd-culture hobbyhorses again, but to me that’s a way in which the preference for worldbuilding has trumped storytelling. People don’t want ideas, they want rules. Oh well, more’s the pity for them.

* Me? I was a little thrown at first, when the lady from The West Wing showed up in a Jesus Christ Superstar costume and started speaking in American-accented Latin. But once she murdered a woman who’d just given birth, bang, I was right back into it and never left. I think this struck just the right mythic, grandiose, creation-legend tone while still remaining in the show’s usual wheelhouse (rimshot!) of family neuroses, unabashed genre staples, and brutal violence. I really enjoyed it.

* I liked the Lord of the Flies allusions, in part because they called to mind what I thought the show would be about back in the day, with Jack as Ralph and Locke as Jack.

* Titus Welliver, man. He sold it. That cocked-head “it’s not fair!” rage, all the worse because he’s right, it really isn’t fair.

* Fucking magnets; how do they work?

* So the Man in Black really is pure evil, because he’s not a man at all.

* This explains how Jacob can be seen as the good guy despite all his murderous manipulation, and how the MIB can be seen as the bad guy despite not really seeming all that bad compared to Jacob (prior to the last episode, that is) and seeming like he really does legitimately just want to be free of Jacob and the Island–that’s not really him plaintively pleading to be let go, that’s the plea of the dead man he’s wearing.

* Wow, that’s creepy, putting it like that.

* What’s at the heart of the Island? Murder! Violence, always violence on this show. Regardless of how things pan out, I think the creators may have already told us which man they believe is right.

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