Lost - the final season

We are three episodes into the final season of Lost. The producers promised no more flashbacks or flashforwards. Instead we get Flashback-and-to-the-sides. We see the surviving cast in "real time" and we see what would have happened to them a few years ago if the flight hadn't crashed. It's hard to say where they are going with this. Will this continue to be a parallel universe, unconnected to the one we've been watching or will they somehow converge at the end? Is this just a way of confirming what Locke/Smoky said - that they all had pitiful lives and were better off on the island? (Not counting all of the ones who died.)

Speaking of Smoky, we now know that he is the second John Locke. We've seen him appear as dead people before. I think that the only time he has previously appeared to multiple people at once was as a horse to Kate and Sawyer (assuming that was him).

We've see the circle of powder that keeps Smoky out before. The first time Locke went to Jacob's cabin he crossed a line of the same powder. We saw the powder again when he tried to find the cabin but it had moved.

Hopefully the people in the temple are related to Ben's people. It would be too weird to have two groups living on the island. Ben's group seemed to support Jacob over Smoky and the temple group seems afraid of Smoky and the island.

Dogen, the head of the temple, said that he was afraid that the island's spirit had sunk into Sayid and tried to poison him because of it. Is this what Locke (the real one) was communicating with? Claire was last seen with Jack's father, Christian. Now, we are told that the island's spirit sunk into her and poisoned her. She seems to have become the new resident mad-woman. There are parallels between Claire and Rousseau, the previous mad-woman. Both had her child taken from her. Both ended up living alone in the jungle. It appears that both spend their spare time setting traps to catch the others.