…maybe, but I think Alpha could have been just biding his time for the right moment to pull the trigger. It's not like Echo lacks for awkward moments to be wiped or reasons to call her handler.

In interviews, Whedon pretty much always says, "I'm a genre guy." What he does best is detecting something in what has gone before, and making it his own. Buffy is a play on the blonde girl in the Horror film, Angel is a corruption of the detective story, and Firefly is Josey Wales/Stagecoach on the Millenium…

A cramped episode
They touched on like five storylines in the cold open, so you knew this episode was going to be teeming with story. It's a testament to the show's creators though that at least a few of these storylines had some nice scenes with breathing room in them. Street's final scene, Saracen and the Coach…

…this was written by two ladies, wasn't it?

Just so long as it's not Stanley Goodspeed, Nic Cage's character from The Rock.

But Noel, wasn't Jack more or less going on his imagination of what Locke guessed was happening? Ben hadn't even gotten to him yet, right? Even if he did, he was going to tell Jack whatever would make him want to go back. So, Locke could guess that he stopped the jumping, but he doesn't know for sure what's…

@Pilgrim: Who are you? T.S. Eliot?

@Spookysqueak: Right. But even when they were floundering, before they cemented their deal with ABC, they always had an end in mind. And that's crucial, because even when you're playing around (or desperately trying to come up with something), you can ask, "does this fit with where we want to go in the end?" And I…

Yeah, I was trying to clarify what Noel was saying about Locke for myself, based on Jensen's column. But I think that the Bentham name is hardly going to be relevant to the character now. No one's going to call him that, and he doesn't call himself that. I think the writers were wise to make the joke explicit with…

I'm eagerly awaiting the next Sun (or Sun/jin) episode. That lady is going to KILL Ben Linus. Well, probably not successfully, but she's got to try, right?

For myself, I think I was less excited by this episode than the last two (while still loving it), because the path was a little bit clearer, and for Lost, more mundane. There were plenty of questions answered, but they were sort of smaller questions, or questions which we had pretty much guessed the answers to. And…

Oh really? That's super cool, Wwoftbbnr!

Heh
I remember thinking - I like what he's doing here, but she's not completely up to it. Strains of "Dollhouse"…

The Island's Locke?
I don't know about the Island making a Locke puppet out of his body. But maybe more like a scrubbed free of his rotten humanity sort of thing works for me - he remains himself, free will and all, but the desperation and the getting in his own way are gone. He certainly seemed confident at the end…

I think it's two ankh symbols. But Richard's going to have sprout some kitty ears…

The King
It crossed my mind that if the Lost showrunners have declared their love for Stephen King, do you think Richard Alpert is sort of a Randall Flagg character?

…and to push it further, it could be America or any other contested territory.

Certainly "Frenzy" era Hitch would have loved Expose… the show, that is.

TomWaits: Yeah, I think I was kidding…probably? But I don't know that getting back is the satisfying conclusion anymore. They've already deflated it from the end of season 3 through now - daily life is maddening. How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen the magical moving Island?

Another week, another crazy theory…
I don't read a lot of Lost blogs, so maybe this has popped up before, but don't you guys think there's a certain amount of Holy Land allegory going on here? A special place that was once untainted, now tainted by the violent battle to control it? Dripping in Egyptian and…