Lost in Purgatory

Are the people in Lost actually in the afterlife instead of being on an island? They dropped a couple of strong hints that this is the case. Locke's father said that his car was rear-ended and he was put in an ambulance. The next thing he knew he was on the island. Plus, the survivor of the helicopter crash said that flight 815 had been found at the bottom of the ocean. Remote cameras showed that everyone was on board when it went down.

This is a red herring. Ben's people caused the car wreck, drugged Locke's father, and brought him to the island under anesthesia. They did the same thing with Juliet. The difference was that she knew she was taking sleeping pills and they allowed her to wake up as the sub landed. We don't know why they went to so much trouble for Locke, but they did.

As for the plane wreck - it's pretty convenient that it was found in a location so inaccessible that nothing could be recovered from the plane. Any other crash and investigators would pull every scrap of metal out of the ocean and reassemble it. And, of course, rescuers would keep searching for a long time unless the plane was found. So Ben's people faked finding the plane. That shows that they are high-placed and powerful.

One other observation - this episode's flashbacks were just days earlier. It gave the show an almost continuous narrative. Contrast this with most episodes where the "A" plot is either the flashback broken up by current time or current time broken up by flashbacks. The flashbacks and the current plotline seldom work together to form a tight narrative like we saw this week.

I've been saying most of this season that the flashbacks were a good device the first season but they get in the way more often than anything else now.

Rumor is that five people will die in May. That's one down. This is their chance to kill of the characters whose backgrounds have been plumbed too deeply. That would be Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Charlie, Sun, and Jin. We haven't learned anything new about these characters in over a year. Any future flashbacks would be a waste of time.

Of course the producers think that Jack, Sawyer, and Kate are a lot more interesting than I do. They devoted half the season to them to the exclusion of the rest of the cast.

So what's coming? The first season was about building the raft and they burned it at the end. The second season was about the hatch and they imploded it at the end. The third season has been about the Others so Ben had better look out.