I’ve thought about this too….could it be that Ben’s trying to flush out Juliet? Maybe she’s not in on the con. There’s definitely a con going on here.

For a while I thought maybe the whole other community is some kind of sick breeding/eugenics experiment like “A Boy and His Dog”, and Juliet was the honey trap. Now, I just think she’s assistant commandant: the velvet viper (with little burnt muffins), and in on the con somehow. I have to go back and listen to who was listening to their conversation at the funeral. Oooh she’s bad, she’s great to hate!

Sometimes I get sick of how easily the others victimize the losties. I mean they even lost the boat. How hard would that have been to defend properly? Not only did they blow up their nice underground apartment, but they keep getting killed off making life worse for themselves. Makes you almost think that if they can’t put up a better defense they get what they deserve.

Next week will be the last new episode until Feb ’07. Other tv series will be wrapping up when Lost picks back up with episode 7. It sucks that we have to wait, but I bet it will be worth it.

how come the white man sees the nice white beautiful light, and the black man sees the big bad black smoke cloud?

When Locke mentioned the light, I assumed he had meant the light inside of the hatch turning on, when he was just about to lose faith in opening it. Of course, we all know it was Desmond now, but for Locke it was a big deal. I am not sure; I’ll have to watch it again.

As for Ben and Juliet maybe still manipulating Jack together, I thought so too…but then I remembered the scene at the funeral where Ben asked Juliet “Why did you show him my x-rays?”. This wasn’t done for Jack’s benefit as there’s no way he could have heard.

I can’t believe that there’s only one episode left in this mini-season! Arrr!

AAA requested to be written out of the show. It wasn’t the writers decision. They’re having to do damage control by saying “Oh, well, when he signed on he said he didn’t want a long commitment to a series”. Sounds very similar to what they said about Michelle Rodriguez when they killed her off because of the dui she was arrested for.
AAA seems like a real jerk from the interviews i’ve seen. Any grown man who acts like that on a tv or movie set should be ashamed of themselves. That’s something a 5 year old does. So RIP Eko.

So I guess jack did save lockes life when it grabbed him. And it chooses to show light or dark. It’s just interesting the forces behind the scenes that are choosing the fates of our losties.

and i am the only that thinks that the whole thing with jack is just a game. Like Juliet is in on it, and they are further just trying to ‘break’ jack. Henry gale probably doesn’t even have a tumor. He has shown no kinda of signs of any illness. especially if he needs it so bad. and what happened to the island healing people? he said he’s never leaving the island, so going back to the real world doesn’t seem plausible.

That being said, some thoughts:

Did anybody else notice that there seems to be more than one smoke monster? There’s the big one that killed Eko, but also at least one smaller one that was flitting around through the jungle. They were never on the screen at the same time, but unless Smokey changes volume at will, I’d say that the small one is not the same creature as the big one. Mama and baby (or babies)? Maybe. Which may be why Smokey actually killed Eko – it (mistakenly) thought that Eko was a threat to its offspring.

As for why they killed Eko off in this episode and not the previous one: They needed to wrap up his story, and the polar bear episode was about Locke and not Eko. With this episode, they were able to focus on Eko and bring his story full circle. It was a much better way to go than the way they killed off Libby, for instance, who never got her story told at all. (Why was she in the ward with Hurley? Why did she give her husband’s boat away to a total stranger? We don’t know, and maybe we won’t ever know.)

And yes, the two new characters aren’t a replacement for Eko. Not even close. What were they doing that other cast members couldn’t have done? Although Paolo seems to be angling to take Sawyer’s place as the guy who makes everybody else hate him. The difference here is that the show’s fans like Sawyer even when they hate him, whereas Paolo is too lame to either love or hate. At least so far. Maybe he’ll get better – go back and re-watch the first few episodes of season 1, before either the writers or Josh Holloway had fully gotten a handle on Sawyer, and note how much the character has improved.

And about the Jack story line, I’m wondering: Is Juliet’s video a set-up? Could Ben have set this whole thing up as part of a last-ditch improvisation to save his plan to “break” Jack? Is Ben crazy enough to go under the knife of a surgeon who’s been asked to kill him, hoping that Jack (being Jack, and stubborn, and contrary, besides being a dedicated surgeon) will refuse to create an “accident” during surgery, and so do his best to make sure Ben survives? After all, Ben was crazy enough to let Rousseau shoot him in the shoulder with an arrow…

Of course, it would have been much simpler if Ben had simply been straight and honest with the castaways to begin with. Rescue them on day 1 (or at least as soon as they figured out that Jack was a spinal surgeon), bring them in to Otherland, give them shelter, and then Jack would have operated on Ben out of gratitude. But that’s not how Ben’s mind works, apparantly; he’s such a paranoid control freak that being honest probably never occurs to him. And if he truly has spent his entire life on the island, that would explain why he’s such a poor judge of character; he’s been raised in an environment where paranoia and manipulation are the norm, and doesn’t understand that it doesn’t have to be that way.

And will we get any answers in next week’s mid-season finale, or just more questions? Silly question – we all know the answer to that one, don’t we?