To be fair, she didn't say it WAS 500-proof (because, physically impossible), but used that number as a point of comparison.

OK, now I can give a more definitive answer. They reunite at the very end of "Last Recruit", right around sunset. In "The Candidate", the next episode, they spend the night in the cages with everyone else, and then in they're busted out, and by daylight go to the sub. Boom. So they get MAYBE twelve hours or so. …

I had heard the Ilana-as-Jacob's-daughter thing before.

And when he comes back, he's all mad about his stuff being taken AGAIN, except a hug from Hurley makes it all better.

In a lot of ways, what Sawyer did was the best thing for the camp. The guns were in the hands of, essentially, the two most volatile people, who had rather arbitrarily decided that they should be in charge of them. With Sawyer hiding them, they were in the hands of one of the more level-headed people.

Yes, but the value of the finale shouldn't be judged on things like, "But what was with the polar bears?" The big answers were there. I'm not crazy about some of those answers, but that has more to do with all of Season 6 as a whole. But I didn't feel like there were Things I Needed To Know, at least in terms of…

Honestly, I'm rewatching Season 6 now, and it seems pretty well planned. I'm not crazy about the plan (namely, making mythological almost mundane by 'normalizing' it, and consolidating various 'mysteries' into one thing for the sake of simplification.) But a plan is clearly there.

Heroes really had only a couple flashes of something approaching greatness, "Company Man" being its closest thing. But for all the accusations LOST gets of "they're just making it up", it felt meticulously outlined compared to Heroes's pure Improv-style "Yes-and-" plotting.

It's more or less a way to say, "This episode didn't advance things that I care about, so I declare it's pointless."

The wheelspin is more in the flashbacks than the main plot. Most of the early Season Three flashbacks— save Not In Portland or Flashes Before Your Eyes— have a staggering lack of anything to say. Most of them just take an established Backstory Element and stretch it out. Especially "I Do" and "Stranger In A…

I imagine some people were thinking
other things when Sawyer emerged from the ocean in his underwear, but I
was just wondering why he would then put on jeans without attempting to
dry off first.

I have to admit, it was the fact that, like, half a dozen people did it that set me off.

It may not have been a costly episode, and they may have offset the costs of the new sets and guest cast by not having to pay most of the main cast, but that isn't the same as a bottle episode.

But it's still incurring extra expense, all the guest actors.

Yeah, but you don't save money by bringing in former Oscar nominees for a one-off part.

See, that's not what a bottle episode is. A bottle episode is where you write to use JUST the main cast (who are already getting paid per their contract) and no guest actors (new contracts) and no new sets (which need to be built and dressed).

New setting (and thus new set to build and dress) almost entirely guest actors. Exact opposite of a bottle episode.

Yeah…. no.

Those episodes were also not bottle episodes. What do you all think a "bottle episode" is?

Not a bottle episode.