The Flame Goes up in Flames

Lost blogging:

In the March 7th episode a small party set on rescuing Jack comes across a station. Officially it is the communications hub although it looks more like a farm.

We finally got one big question answered - where Kate's horse came from. We also found out that the Others have a submarine.

We also met eyepatch guy who might be named Mikhail Bakunin. He claimed to be the last member of the Dharma Initiative but he lied about that so he might have given a false name, also.

The Flame Station was tantalizing. There was a communications dish. It might not have worked, but we know that Sayid could have fixed it. There was also a basement full of tapes and manuals. Probably a lot of answers were there.

But Locke blew it up. He discovered that winning a computer chess game gave access to a set of options and codes. Most of them were broken but there was one to use if hostiles gained control of the station. No surprise - it blew up the station.

My daughter's reaction was "stupid Locke" but there is more to it. On the dramatic level, the producers aren't going to give us answers that easily. One the practical level, they couldn't have held the station. It was not defensible. It was surrounded by hills and tall vegetation grew right up to it. If they had stayed it would have turned into a trap. By blowing it up, Locke respected the wishes of the Initiative and denied the Others further use of the station. This may hurt them in the future.

Assuming that at least some of what Mikhail said was true, there was a war between the Initiative and the Others some time before. This still leaves several questions.

1) Who is dropping food and supplies?
2) Who recruited Juliet? The implication was that the Initiative was killed off longer ago than the three years that she was on the island.

Could it be that the Initiative still exists on the mainland and doesn't know that the Others have taken over completely?

Mikhail mentioned that the Others have been there a very long time. Do some of them date to the Black Rock (the slave ship they got the TNT from)?

The show is beginning to feel more like itself again.