It's not as good as BABYLON 5. If you lined up all of the show's best episodes back-to-back you might get enough to match FIREFLY, but that's a tricky one as FIREFLY did have the 100% excellence thing to it whilst LOST has had a lot of duff episodes (but then comparing 14 episodes to 112 so far might be a bit unfair).

Whether LOST goes down as better than BSG and X-FILES depends on its ending. If the ending sucks, than no. If it's great, than yes. I am concerned about them leaving it until a mere seven episodes before the end of the series to let us know what the Island is and what the stakes are (B5 did it seventeen episodes into Season 2, less than half-way through the series), but they have been addressing some fundamental questions this season which leads me to hope for a good ending.



The writers of LOST are extremely clever. The number of ideas and references they have laced into the show is impressive, and pretty much everything that we're seeing on-screen now was planned in detail back to the start of Season 3, and in broader strokes back to almost the start of the show. The biggest problem I have is that based on the new revelations, some of the stuff (particularly in Seasons 1 and 2) doesn't seem to entirely track, particularly the extremely hostile treatment the Oceanic 815 survivors got from the Others. If Richard 'founded' the Others as Jacob's own gang of do-gooders, why were they so unrelentingly hostile to the 815ers for so long? Why didn't MiB directly appear to any of the 815ers as himself (he always took other forms, like Smokey, Eko's brother and so on)?

That all said, this was a good episode. Great trivia moments - the Black Rock smashing the statue down was hilarious, and Captain Magnus Hanso was first mentioned on the blast door map in the Swan Station back in Season 2 - and some great stuff for Nestor Carbonell as Richard, not to mention the WoT discussion thing about evil seeping into the world without the Island/Seal. Intriguing stuff.