If "off The Island" is the goal (and obviously we can't discount that at this point), does Hydra Island count or not? If I had to guess, I'd say Hydra counts as "The Island" since it warped with the rest of the it when Ben turned the donkey wheel. I'd be a bit surprised if just getting everyone over to Hydra was…

Getting the gang together
It seems to me that Smokey isn't trying to get all of the candidates together so they can get off the island together: instead, he wants to get them all in one place to kill them off in one swoop. After all, recall the exchange from last week:

Does it make sense to say "a combination of (a) and (b)"? What I mean is: there will probably (guessing from tonight's preview) be a mix of current on-island and flashback (like season one) but the flashbacks may be set over a long span of time ("Other-48 style").

This really comes down to how they execute the mechanics of the timeline split—in the ALT, if they never landed on the island, they never traveled back in time, so he was never a Dharma dude. We've yet to learn definitively if the ALT just branched off the timeline we already knew (and if so, at what point) or if it's…

"What'll it be, Frank?"

Widmore's side
So, where do we think this leaves Widmore? The fact that he was lugging around an anti-Smokey fence seems awfully definitively to place him in (at least) the anti-smoke camp, but does that have to land him on the pro-Jacob side? That doesn't really fit to me; I have a hard time thinking that Charles is…

I was very much of two minds after it ended—on the one hand, had the feeling that nothing had happened at all (including the fact that there weren't really any "answers"). But at the same time, I really enjoyed the fucking thing, mostly because I just like Sawyer a lot.

@April

@Snuggles

@k3k

Hmmm. I've gotten the sense that the cave was Smokey's all along, and he and Jacob were simultaneously tracking the same list. Sure, unLocke said Jacob wrote the names. Why trust him at this point? It would have been odd to say "Hello Sawyer, welcome to my creepy fortune-teller cave. I've been part of the conspiracy…

Mirrors
I haven't seen this pop up in the comments yet (if it has, my apologies): did we get a look at Ben looking in a mirror? I don't remember. I recall him looking into a microwave—did we see his reflection in it?

Prof and Mayor, I'm right there with you. (So much so that, having not seen your comment, I said the same damn thing downthread.) On the one hand, it seems to make tons of sense given what we know so far, but on the other hand… it's just pretty damn weird, isn't it? I guess it depends on what MIB and Jacob "are":…

I'm also pretty pleased that, after the early-season "characters spread all over the island" we've gotten them more or less coalesced into two groups, where it looks like they'll stay for the time being. That'll alleviate the feeling I've had that characters have been getting ignored if they're not episode-centric,…

It's white… it's bald… and it looks like an ex-cripple bitch?

I would think that, with Widmore back in the game, Desmond can't be far behind.