I'm guessing being shot will cause her to lose her baby, which could relate to the "ceasing to exist" Widmore spoke of.

Jack is back
I loved the scene at the end of Jack giving Sun the pad. I thought when he reached out his hand toward here it was a direct parallel to Locke doing the same in the garden.

1981 with a bullet.

Audio
What format is that audio? I can never listen to shit on AV Club, unless it's LaLA

Chloe Sevigny is a bitch
Oops, that was taken out of context.

1981

I was speaking more in the present form of said box still on mustache, not the past tense where the smell would factor in.

Also remember Jacob probably ordered the killing of the US Army soldiers by The Others in the 50s. We know Richard was used as a middleman for Jacob/The Others - one could infer that Jacob suggested the killing.

Sonofson, I like that Apep theory, because it corresponds to Maat, and feeds in to the Egyptian view of Hell I posted last night. A repost of a passage about the Ancient Egyptian view of Hell:

The only parallel I've been able to see to Ben calling Smokey is the murky water in the Temple. The Temple water looked a lot like the water that ran out of the basin Ben used.

I just have a hard time accepting the flash sideways as an epilogue I think.

That's a really interesting theory on Smokey…but what if Smokey is Jacob's father? We've seen so many characters with daddy issues on the show, could Jacob be the original? Maybe Smokey was grooming Jacob to take over the Island, so he could escape. But when Jacob took over, he knew that he couldn't allow his father…

Assuming the sideways timeline is a Jacob-less world, does that mean Smokey aka Evil is loose? If so, should be expect some kind of face off in the flash sideways as well?

I think that the Candidates have some kind of pass on the invite-only rules. Could be part of the loophole.

I think they've said that Kate's horse was Smokey, and I trust that we hadn't seen Jacob as anyone else. That butterfly was noticeably conspicuous though.

When you bring that up it makes me think of Ben. He saw his mother on the Island, even though she had died off of it. Richard was very intrigued by this. Tonight may have given us the reason why - because Richard once saw his wife on the Island. I don't think Smokey has appeared as Walt though; I think that was Walt…

I thought that to…the water looked much higher.

I don't really think it has anything to do with trickery. I think the reason it took him 140 years is because he needed someone who could be invited to see Jacob.
Jacob made a point to Richard that no one was let inside unless Jacob invited them. From that point on, Richard served as an intermediary between Jacob and…

Richard wanted to see the New World (America) but that's not neccecarily where Hanso's ship was going.

I just chalked it up to him living a life of semi-isolation on an Island. News didn't travel too fast back then. It's not like he could get on the internet.