Seeing as it came with some Dharma logo'd paraphenalia I figure it's the site of another of their compounds, long since abandoned and they use captive Polar bears specifically for experiments. I assume the ancient use of the site was of interest to them though we're still in the dark about all that. Perhaps it had similar "powers" as the island.

I don't think that the specific nature of that site matters to the plot other than as background on the scope and history of the Dharma project.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of thier backstory and mythology.

The man on the boat is Michael, or his son, wilt. I've thought about this one long and hard, and this makes sense to me. When Michael took the boat out, he was told directions from Ben, that would have led him right to the "boat" 80 miles off shore... What do you think???

Negative. Ben's surprise when he heard over the walkie about Naomi nixes that one. He knows who they are, but he didn't know exactly when they were coming--and certainly not where they were (prior to having someone on board??) a few weeks ago when Michael left.

I like how Sayid is an assassin working for Ben in the present. I wonder what persuaded him to switch sides.

Especially given Sayid's quote about only trusting Ben after having sold his soul.

What was it that Sayid said to Ben at the very end of the episode? I replayed it several times and just couldn't make it out. Ben's reply was "Good.", followed by the blackout ending.

I imagine Sayid and Ben's target list involves executives of a cabal who are trying to exploit the island in some nefarious way and perhaps are behind the boat crew. Who knows.

Anyways, hooray for gripping flashforwards!

Sayid said something about them knowing he was coming after them and Ben responded by saying "Good."

Yes, exactly. Ben said, "I have another name for you." Sayid, "But now they know I'm coming for them." Ben, "Good." Black.

This season has been absolutely spectacular so far. The flash-forward format has completely reinvigorated the series. The flashbacks had gotten to the point of distractions from the major plot while now I'm finding the flash forwards to be more compelling than the events on the island.

Is anyone else excited about Miles the Ghostbuster being with Locke the next time they encounter Jacob?

Woo hoo fun times!!

And what do you make of the bracelet just like Naomi's on the wrist of Sayid's latest victim.?

I think it means that the syndicate/group that's after Ben on the island fail to get him, and are still trying to kill him once he's escaped from the island. For whatever reason, Sayid is helping Ben, presumably to protect either the other members of the Oceanic 6, or others still present on the island.

I really think that the syndicate/group (that seems to have the black guy, Abbadon, as its quasi-leader) has something to do with DHARMA. Basically, this is their way of trying to exact revenge for the purge.

I can't decide if I'm really interested in the 31minute time difference... Its interesting, but I just need some answers. Still love the show.

It's a really tricky line to walk, incorporating time travel and relativistic physics into a mass-media TV show like that. I'm hoping that there's no popular revolt and alienation because of that.

I sure am. I'm guessing it ain't going to go very well for Miles.

That was the impression I got. In fact, didn't Ben say something about that in the last few seconds of the episode?

That whole last scene, the dialog was so fast and muttered, it was hard to actually make sense of. Unusual for this show.

That's my suspicion too.

Here's the thing: Sayid has been established as a highly principled sell-out. He's got a rigid moral code, but when the shit hits, he'll do what he needs to do, and pay the emotional price later. That's what got him into torture, that's what had him work Sawyer over in S1, etc. Some serious shit must have happened to have him become Ben's gun-monkey.

This whole flash-forward thing is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. There's a whole new life to the series now.

So I've only started watching this show since season 3 (wikipedia caught me up with everything else) ... and I'm beginning to wonder, do other fans really think that there will be answers to all of the major questions floating out there to this show? Are we really going to be satisfied with all of the explanations with everything by the end of this show?

I'm thinking that we'll have a lot of answers, but there's still going to be a lot that we'll be confused about...

I think the 31 minute issue is a matter of the island's effects on electronics as opposed to a genuine attempt to bring relativity or "realistic" time travel into the picture. We know for a fact that you can make real time communications by phone off the island (there was no weird lag with Penny and Charlie or with any of the island crew and the freighter) so any new time latency issues are going to create problems with that established fact. Guess I could be wrong, but we know the island does funny things with machines. We don't have any clear evidence of its effect on time.

My thinking here is that Daniel talked to the freighter "live"... complete with the freighter saying that the payload was delivered, then some time later (I presume actually 31 minutes on the island), the payload appeared on the island. So the freighter talked to Daniel, and reported a quick delivery, yet delivery was delayed. I am flummoxed.

Holy cow talk about a good episode of Lost. This show revitalizes itself every episode.

This episode was AMAZING.

Who caught the details of the Black Rock/Hanso/Widmore tie-in? I think I got it all except the particular Hanso who was the former owner of the journal.

Penny's been searching--presumably with the help of the Portugese from the end of S2--for Des. She said three years. Does that line up with how long we think Desmond's been on the Island?

The interesting thing now is to see how time is perceived differently on vs. off the island. How come communication can be synchronous? Shouldn't Penny's transmission (from London, presumably) have been sped up or slowed down? Am I thinking too linearly? This "answer" prods all sorts of other interesting questions!

Oh, wow, I'm still floored by the sheer awesomeness that was this episode of LOST. Going in from seeing the previews last week, I didn't want it to hype it in my head too much, but it didn't disappoint. Everything was just ... perfect.

What I want to know is, what makes Penny decide one day that she's going to start looking for Desmond? My guess is when she finds out that Desmond goes missing during the race and doesn't finish (much less come in first), she decides to start her quest. And according to (http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/Desmond), the span of time in which Desmond has been on the island and how long Penny has been looking for him seem to match up.

The other thing is that I didn't catch all of the details, but there was something about how the boat was deliberately not answering calls from Penny. This definitely makes me think that Widmore/Hanso has something to do with the freighter crew and their attempts to infiltrate the island again.

All in all, absolutely fantastic episode.

I missed the first seven minutes of this episiode, from what I saw this question wasn't answered. There are two dichotomies regarding time:
1) On versus off the island, (the 31 minute discrepancy with the rocket)
2) People stuck in time versus people unbound by time (ie. Desmond and Eliouise the (dead) rabbit)

So this episode discussed the second question, about how Desmond was able to see the future and how he flashed back into the past, but it doesn't answer the first question.

I had some issues with the whole "unbound by time" thing. If Desmond wasn't bound, then shouldn't he have been able to see into the future and known that he would have contacted Penny, so why would he freak out?

Also interesting was the note in Faraday's notebook saying, "Desmond is my constant". My only guess about why this is significant is that it could mean Faraday also unbound himself from time.

This was one of the most satisfying episodes...I felt like I should have smoked a cigar afterwards. Finally some real answers that begin to put some parameters on the crazy lost universe.

Oh yeah, forgot about this thought... well, perhaps the freighter is in the normal space-time as the rest of the world, and that's why transmissions appear normal. In fact, all electronic communications to/from the island have had no anomaly whatsoever. There are the satellite phone calls to/from the ship, there was the communication with Penny in the season finale of last year, there was Ben communicating with his man in America to prove to Juliet that her sister was alive and well. So I'm beginning to think that this time anomaly has more to do with one's own perception of time -- though this is admittedly something that I'll have to digest and think about for a while...

This has got to be THE BEST episode of lost EVER!!! I have it on my DVR so I plan to watch it again. I know I had to miss a few things because I just about stared with my jaw on the floor most of the time.

I agree with INKRIMINATOR......I need a smoke after that too!!!

Des wasn't unbound in a Billy Pilgrim kind of way. (A shiny new nickel to the first person to cite the reference!) As we saw, he was bouncing between two very specific times. He had no memory of who he was in the show's present of Christmas Eve day, 2004--it was as if leaving the island had the side effect of reaching back into his past (1997, did he say?) and pulling that consciousness into the show's present.

There's an inconsistency, though--the ship's comm officer, whose name I forgot but who was unstuck in the same way--remembered his position and circumstances of the current time. That's necessary from a storytelling point of view; he has to be able to tell our losties enough about the radio room to motivate their action. But it's inconsistent with the symptoms Des was having.

By the way, I'll bet another shiny nickel that this was originally written to be aired around Christmas time. This was LOST's version of a Christmas episode, that got schedule-FUBARed by the writer's strike.

"If something goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant."

All he's saying is, coming and going from the island is dangerous. Particularly, it seems, for people exposed to radiation or strong electromagnetism (like, say, turning the failsafe key in a magnetism-related bunker). Daniel has been exposing himself to radiation regularly in the past (particularly his head), and so would be at risk. He's GOT to come and go from the island via those particular bearings, or he's toast. But if he is, he now has Desmond to balance his equation, and he'll be fine.

Problem is, he can't know that he'll be bouncing between the NOW of the island and the NOW in which Des came to him at Cambridge for help. The effect is random--might be just a few hours, might be years. He could find himself bouncing to when he was a high school physics geek, with no Desmond to come along for a decade.

I don't know that it's inconsistent as opposed to just convenient storytelling. We don't have any idea how far in time the comm officer was jumping, or if the jumps always work with the "anchor" in the past as opposed to the current/future. There's nothing that we know about being unbound to give us a great deal of guidance here, so the officer could've been completely disoriented in his "other state" (which we never saw) like Desmond was on the boat. Either way, it doesn't bother me very much.

A fantastic episode. Desmond has been one of my favorites ever since he was introduced and they continue to do him justice whenever an episode focuses on him. Next week looks like it'll be a riot, too. This season just keeps delivering. I'm just sad they're going to have to cut it short.

Oh, yeah, no, it's a quibble. It didn't even occur to me until I was typing up that post. More of a "hunh, that's interesting" than anything else.

I'm not sure we can assume that the "side effects" will affect everyone in the same way. Perhaps that's why Minkowski (the ship's comm officer -- and I guess that's why he wasn't answering the phone...) could remember his position and circumstances of the current time, and Desmond can't. And Desmond's in a good position if he no longer remembers crashing on the island, accidentally killing Kelvin, pushing the button, being in the hatch for 3+ years, etc... for all he knows, it's 1996 again and he's waiting to be reunited with Penny.

I don't think that this was written to be aired around Xmas time... before the strike happened, I was always under the impression that LOST was going to be aired on a Jan/Feb-May timeframe for the final 3 years.

I believe that there will be different side effects depending on the person. If we go back to when Des was in his past and in Faraday's office, Faraday said that he got the mouse to run the maze because he was actually going to teach the mouse an hour from then how to run the maze. So with the mouse it jumped first to the future. Now with Des, his first trip was to the past and that is where his mind got stuck and couldn't remember anything in his life past that point.

I got the impression that Desmond recovered his memory when he talked with Penny. He called Sayid by name, and said he was fine.

Even so--and we may never be able to resolve it--but I'd bet Damon and Carlton originally wrote it intending it to be aired around Christmas. But you can win my shiny nickel anyway.

http://govia.osef.org/nickel.baiRie8a.png

I believe he got his memory back also. I think that was the whole point behind Des addressing Sayid by his name.:thumbsup:

This is how I interpreted the scenario, so if I am wrong please tell me.

When Desmond was in the helicopter and went back to 1996, his memories of 2004 were erased because of the high exposure to radiation when he turned the key in season 2 (or was it season 3?) . When Desmond left 1996 and returned to the present, it was like he just arrived and has no memories of the last three years. The only way to regain all his memories from 2001-2004 is to go back to 1996 and find his constant, which happens to be Penny, and tell her not to change the phone number so he can call her on December 24, 2004. When he came back to the present, December 24, 2004, he called the present Penny and made contact, which then brings back all his memories from the past three years. I think the time travel ended once he made contact with his constant.

This is like memorizing a formula!

Hmm... ok, maybe I was mis-remembering the scene and thought that Desmond only knew Sayid's name from having "met him for the first time" just then. But it seems like lostpedia claims that now Desmond's fine, and the whole "once you make contact with your constant everything's fine" rule vaguely makes sense.

Hooray!

I read that the series finale for Star Trek:TNG was a major influence to the writers in writing this particular episode of Lost. Pretty interesting parallels, there.

I'm still floored by how excellent this episode of LOST was...

It was my impression as well that he recovered his memory when he talked to Penny, though it's certainly up for consideration.

Hot damn that was an amazing episode!

The extent and nature of the time travel side effects are not just keyed into the person but also Geography.

1.) Faraday charted a safe course through the time turbulence (I just made that up) so the crew wasn't affected.
2.) The thunderstorm blew the returning helicopter slightly off that path, triggering radioactive Des's jumps.
3.) The Comm officer (works with radio waves) recklessly approached the island in a small boat without taking heed and both he and his crewmate paid for it with their lives.

So the extent of both a previous exposure to high energies AND your brush with the island's time turbulence will determine how severely and wildly you will be effected.

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut! I'll pass on the nickel but I will take a Penny. Hubba Hubba!

Ok, so at the end of Season 2, Ben told Michael to go on a different heading when he and Walt left on the boat. I wonder if that will have any adverse (or different) effects on Michael and Walt, or if for whatever reason the headings are different by air and by boat.

I think we'll find out when we Spoiler: discover that Michael is Ben's man on the boat. I don't know anything, there, I'm just guessing.

Apparently Actor Malcom Kelly, who plays Walt, has hit puberty and the time travel angle will be used to help explain his sudden growth.

Yeah. I loved that Locke referred to that. "It was Walt. Well... Walt, but taller...".

You think all this time travel stuff is setting us up for the triumphant return of Michael and Walt? And do you think that in the time Walt used to grow up, Michael grew his Matrix Reloaded hair back? Cause I'm as straight as guys come, and even I thought that was hot.

Triumphant?? I hated Michael after season 2. There would be nothing triumphant about his return. :grumpy:

Perhaps that's the "cliffhanger" that the producers were talking about at the end of episode 8 for this season. That was one of the reasons they decided to air what they've got while the strike was going on. It seems plausible.

But why would he decide to start working for Ben? (The same question we're asking for Sayid!)

I'm not convinced that he is but I CAN think of a couple of possible reasons:

1.) After leaving the island he didn't find his way back to the mainland and needed help. He wouldn't be welcome back at the island after his betrayal so who else could he turn to?

2.) Ben's ultimate goals are for the greater good after all.

On the other hand doesn't the organization behind the boat people have full knowledge of the lost passenger identities? The crew appears to be hand picked so how could they possiblly hire Michael unknowingly? Eh, perhaps he's a stowaway.

/me shrugs