WTF?

This episode was a bit of a head trip and was perhaps the creepiest episode LOST's had yet. I mean, holy cow, how much creepy stuff can you fit into one episode?

After "The Man Behind the Curtain," Luke sent me a text saying that it was time for me to retire my "best in series" title from last week's episode, "The Brig." While I thought "The Man Behind the Curtain" was greatness all around, "The Brig" is still my favorite of season 3 and possibly all time. Though I think the Best In Series may end up being the season finale. Holy crap that looks INTENSE!

Anya and I watched "Heroes" last Monday, and on the most recent episode of "Heroes," Sylar, the resident bad guy of the show, was revealed to have issues given to him by his parents. In all honesty, I thought that Sylar's "mommy" issues resided in the netherlands of lameness. I mean, there was nothing in his backstory that really seemed to warrant him becoming the villain he became. Ben's parental issues, on the other hand, were just flat out bad ass. His mother died in child birth (explains his fixation on issues of fertility?) and his father was such a dead beat (another character with daddy issues), he took his kid to a deserted island where he did nothing but drink and leave his son to chase ghostly apparitions of his mother through the jungle.

I knew with a certain degree of certainty that the skeleton in Hurley's van would end up being someone of importance in the LOST universe, but I had no idea that it would end up being Ben's dad, Roger. The scene of Ben killing his father and the purge of the Dharma Initiative was one of the best scenes of the season so far.

Although, I'm still not entirely certain that the "hostiles" weren't a part of the Dharma Initiative too. The obvious choice is that the two are separate groups, but how twisted and psychotic would it be if the Dharma Initiative set this whole thing up as yet another part of their experiment. It's obvious now that the Dharma Initiative people are part of a larger social experiment; who's to say that the hostiles aren't part of it? Time will tell.

One thing that seems rather obvious to me is that Ben is losing control of his group. If Tom drinking coffee while Ben protested Mikhail's beatdown by Locke wasn't enough evidence, the scene with Jacob completely sealed the deal. As you can tell, Ben and Jacob were in clear communication with one another as the scene progressed. But the great part of that scene, is that I think that Jacob disappeared to Ben when he appeared to Locke, and I think that freaked Ben out.

Actually, it freaked Locke out too, but for completely different reasons. Locke was freaked out because he heard Jacob and saw a flash of him, and it freaked him out like a child would be freaked out by a ghost, while Ben was freaked out because he had never experienced not being able to see Jacob before. I thought it was pretty funny how Locke ran out of the house. I've had similar experiences when leaving places I thought were haunted.

My theory is that somehow, someway, Locke and Jacob are the same person. Check out that picture of Jacob I posted a couple of days ago. That forehead. That nose. They look very Locke-like to me. I think we'll see a little more Jacob this year to either confirm or deny this theory, but I think Jacob is a season 4 question.

Let's just clear this up right now. Locke is not dead. There's a reason why he was shot (once) in the place where his kidney would have been. I do think the Producers dropped the ball. If they had filmed the scene to be a little more intense, maybe a stronger musical cue, then it would have been more obvious that Locke was dead. If Locke ends up dying on the show, he's going to get a HUGE send off, so I was pretty certain that he's still alive and kicking.

What's uncertain to me is whether or not Ben meant to kill him or not. The LOST people have a tendency to set things up characters to act a certain way, only to have it revealed later that what you thought was true isn't. And I would not be surprised one bit if Ben is actually helping Locke along on his journey by "killing him."

The Jack/Juliet stuff was good, but it's all set-up for bigger events at this point. The "next time on..." seemed to confirm this.

Stuff I can't wait to find out:

-Why Richard doesn't seem to age from the time child-Ben ran into him in the woods to the present.

-Why is Ben so freaked out that Naomi parachuted onto the island?

-Are the Others going to succeed in stealing the pregnant women?

-Is Kate pregnant? My answer? Of course.

-What the heck have Jack and Juliet been working on? Was Rousseau's trek to the Black Rock and subsequent dynamite stockpiling a part of the plan?

-Why does the eye-patch man, Mikhail, keep getting his ASS KICKED? First Sayid. Then Locke. Then Jin. Then Locke again. Almost feeling bad for the guy.

-They say 5 deaths are getting ready to happen. I'm almost afraid to ask, but who are they? At this point, I've grown so attached to the characters, that it's hard to imagine losing any of them. :-(

Guess we'll see in a few days/weeks.

-Matt