This is an excellent point. The whole point of White Bear Justice Park was sadistic revenge, not keeping other potential victims safe, or any kind of rehabilitation. Watching someone get tortured for amusement isn't far from being a torturer yourself.

Agreed. She was deceived and once inside, there was no way out.

Like "Stranger," this ep to me points clearly to Hurley's eventual role and destiny as a solar hero, and thus ultimately to the Island's long-term protector.

I'm pretty unusual for thinking that this is a highly significant episode, if not all that much fun to watch.

Hurley: Watching his father leave or before he won the lottery.

A lot of Season 3 gets echoed/revisited in Season 6, so for me it's hard to separate the two.

Hurley really wants to get away from Locke in that census scene, doesn't he?

if Ben has had this tumor all along, why isn't he showing any pain while he's in the Swan with the castaways?

Continued…

Oh, man, that's a delightfully gruesome theory. I've read theories about MiB simply moving Christian and Yemi's bodies in order to fool Jack and Eko better. This is more "demonic," so to speak.

> I've never considered that there's a reason why they were the only two working security…

First off, happy LOST day!

This episode… so many tantalizing hints of future Island weirdness. Locke's vision still makes my hair stand on end. When you sit down and parse it, it's magnificent.

That's a great way to put it, that the Island makes the light inside a person "a little brighter."

>The problem is that Ben not only thinks he's special, but smarter than anyone else in the room.

Now that I've ranted on like I did, I'd love to hear your first-time reactions to Juliet. I think you mentioned that she provided spark to the show at this point. Did you think that (for instance) LOST was beginning to sag a bit in the middle, as stories sometimes do?

In light of your earlier question, re: first impressions of Juliet, her behavior with Kate and Sawyer on the chain gang made me dislike her even more.

To be fair, on the first watch I didn't think much about Juliet at all. I groaned a bit, "Oh, no, *more* characters," and assumed this was either a flashback or off-the-Island segment set in Los Angeles, especially with the earthquake. I had already pegged Juliet as "woman in trouble" (the tears; conflicted facial…

I really enjoyed this Sun-centric episode, which established her as "Daddy's little gangster girl" who was willing to pretty much sacrifice anybody who got in her way. It also got me wondering if that baby really was Jin's (more on that when we get to "D.O.C.")

The season opening is brilliant, right up there with the Pilot in its scope. That there was still an on-Island colony shouldn't have come as a shock (given the Swan Hatch), but it still does, especially with that breathtaking scene when the camera pulls back to reveal Otherton in the middle of an Island caldera.