Big question indeed. Perhaps it's half-answered already, though. The "sideways" is more pleasant to some characters (Jack, who made up with his son in a reversal of how he couldn't make up with Christian), but hardly to others like Charlie, or even Jin and Sun, or the Penny-less Desmond, the apparently Rose-less Bernard (who retired to take care of Rose in "reality", and Locke who is even more miserable and pathetic bearing the burden of his fate and his father's than he was when his dad had crippled him. More importantly though, is the fact Daniel and Desmond seem convinced the "Sideway" is all wrong, that this isn't how reality should be, that reality should be something else, and something important. It looks to me like Desmond's mission might be to make the "Sideway" end, that the Sideway is a chaotic split reality caused by the fact that with "the incident" and Jacob's death the future is now uncertain unless and until a new Guardian is chosen, and reality is now going in all sort of wrong directions. We have more than enough evidence to know the Sideway didn't branch out of the detonation as planned, and as we believed early on. The far past has also been changed in many random ways, and the main feature is that nonetheless the "Losties" are still all linked - in many cases no longer by the crash but by relationships that reunites them.

What I'm ackwardly trying to say is that maybe the Sideway was caused by MiB' power increasing, a result of the detonation of the nuclear bomb, and the Sideway might be the beginning of the end for the world - if it goes on that's the reality that will be when suddenly MiB escapes and end it all. It's not how the incident truly happened, and it wasn't dealt with by Dharma building an hatch and eventually getting wiped out by the "hostiles" (and the first hint of another Sideway happened to Desmond right after he used the failsafe. It's not Daniel who told him then his reality was wrong, it's Eloise as a jeweller who told him this was wrong, he couldn't buy the ring and marry Penny and his path was something else. Desmond was also conscious he had lived these events before, differently. Already he bumped into Charlie, incidentally). The sideways are like a giant version of that sequence from season 3, again with Desmond trying to fix things up.

It looks like Desmond is trying to make the others see the "Sideway" mustn't be.

So somehow I doubt it will end with everyone but the Guardian (and Smocke) living in the Sideway reality, that the crash will have been real only for Jacob's replacement while the rest of the rejected candidates will be returned to "reality", one where the crash didn't happen. But I might be very wrong.



I wonder a lot too how much they'll cave in to the happy ending formula. They've broken so many "rules" (traditions might be more apt) of American TV with this show, I can't say I feel confident in any way of how they'll end this. I would be surprised they let MiB win as this would be incredibly preachy and pretentious (look people at how flawed humanity has failed and let evil destroy itself), but beyond that I'm expecting pretty much anything, from unpredictable plot twists (Jack dying and Desmond being the chosen one, though I still think he's just
the cosmic wildcard/joker or almost literally the deus ex machina - God's hand in the "game" to reprieves for some dead players to killing off all the main cast but the chosen one.



The existence of the Temple and its ash ring made me think of that possibility, that and the fact if Jacob never left a finger to save the innocents he's brought along the candidates on the Island, this undermines his "goodness" a lot. It's bad enough so many innocents died in the crash, but that was the outside and perhaps out of Jacob's hands. It may not be his choice to bring candidates in the first place, we have only MiB's word for it right now, and we know he twists the truth. The survivors who weren't candidates were however Jacob's responsability. It seemded to me his list consisted of deserving people (ie: the "good" stewardess for example) and innocents (the children). Off his list were the candidates, and apparently people who were candidates who must prove themselves first.

The temple is incidentally where Ben's people were heading when they left the barracks in season 3. Ben's group were the ones outside making various experiments and in contact with the outside. The real base of Jacob's followers was the temple.




They've used the "puzzle" metaphor a lot before, and I expect a lot of the apparently disparate pieces of mysteries will come together to form whole.

For instance, the pregnant woman in the preview makes me think we'll understand what the deal was with Jacob's followers trying to have children, and why they couldn't. In one episode, Richard presented this to Locke as Ben's foolish plans and not the true calling of their people, but at the same time Richard was the one off the Island working hard to get this to work, and there are "obvious" signs that Jacob, not Ben, was behind this - like the "miraculous" death Juliet's ex-husband to clear the way, the miraculous cure of Juliet's sister to convince Juliet to stay. But then, IRRC, Ben will be shown later to have also pretended to do Jacob's will, when in fact Jacob wasn't speaking to him. - so maybe Richard was telling the truth, and it's Ben who sought a way to make a true "Island people", as part of his conflict over the Island with Widmore, instead of bringing outsiders to the Island. What then of "Jacob's list" of people to kidnap among the survivors? If that's all Ben's doing, then the list is his own, of people he decided were candidates for "his people", of children he could indoctrinate as he wished and so on, leaving outside all the "flawed people", quite unaware that it's among them that Jacob's real candidates were. It makes more sense that my idea of Jacob saving innocents in a way. For instance, Ben (not Jacob) would have been attracted by Walt or the pregant women, and he let Walt go because, as he said, he got more than he bargained for (Walt's powers were dangerous and useless as Ben had no control over them).

Anyway... I think what we really need is one big "info dump" mystery-solving episode and I think this is what the writers have in mind doing next week. They could solve things through the finale (at the risk of slowing the action with info-dumpish "revelations", which they tend to avoid in fast-paced action episodes like last night's), but instead I suspect they decided on a different structure. Before giving us the final conflict between good and evil, they'll solve most of the mysteries with a kind of part 2 to the Ricardo episode that will solve the Jacob/MiB and Island back story and make us understand how this got there, and what the real stakes are. They've teased us with the reveal MIB was Christian appearing to Jack, and now the stage is set: I expect a segment of next episode (after the ancient stuff is dealt with, or more probably far past and recent past in parallel) will show us many of the actions of MIB and Jacob through the seasons, enough that we'll be able to puzzle out the rest through fan debates on every scene not part of those "flashbacks". When was it MIB and when was it Jacob, and when was it something else? Did Walt have powers or not? What of Charlie's visions? Why was Eko not under Jacob's protection, or Danielle's team? Was it Jacob or MIB who made Locke obsess with the hatch? Is Claire alive by a choice of MIB to use her against the candidates or because he couldn't kill her and the Temple folk had not managed to do it for him?

The title of the penultimate episode "why they died", could suggest the "info dump" is a two parter, first Jacob and MIB's back story, and then the episode that will explain what has happened on the Island since the crash in those "who was behind what" flashbacks perhaps mixed with the build up to the island conflict in present time, from Team Losties's side. That would probably make next week's episode the big mythology one and focussed on MiB's build up to the final conflict, and the next one will be devoted to the wrapping up the character development of the remaining main cast, showing us where they failed/succeeded tests, setting the stage for their final roles and the final conflict. "Why they die" could also be another title with a double meaning. Not only referring to the final stakes and why Jin/Sun and co. died, but also going back to explain many of the other deaths since season one and showing us MIB and Jacob playing the game with the Losties.

The only big "chunk" to wrap up then would be the full disclosure on the Widmore/Ben conflict, unless that too is covered in one of the two upcoming episodes. It's possible, as I suspect a lot this conflict for the Island among Jacob's followers might be the reason why he had to bring another batch of candidates to the Island. OTOH, I also suspect the Widmore/Ben conflict and how they deal with it and whether they solve it and unite or destroy one another will be a main wildcard in the finale, so perhaps they'll wait until then to give us the final elements of their back story and what their game for control of the Island was really about.

They better give us some good Linus stuff in the last episodes. Ben sliding off the radar so much is my only real disappointement this season.