It's time again. Let's chop up some LOST and make a luscious salad.

Previously, On LOST: Oceanic Flight 815 crashed and bashed and smashed onto an island. The dozens of survivors (who I call the Oceanics) discovered that the island (which I call the island), was already rather heavily populated by a native population (who the Oceanics call The Others). The Others worship a powerful being, who they call Jacob. The Others call that being "Jacob" because (it will turn out) the being's consciousness occupies the body of a guy named Jacob. Fair enough, right? (I call this Jacob-occupying being The Island—as distinct from both the man Jacob and the geographical structure of the island—but nobody else does this.) Because The Others worship Jacob, I call them The Jacobians (nobody else does this, either).

Over three seasons, the Oceanics tried to escape and the Jacobians tried to prevent them and abduct them, which led to a battle for control of the island, and now the Oceanics are on top, having snapped the necks of/run over/shot many of the Jacobians' key soldiers, and having captured the Jacobians' leader. The Oceanics used to call the Jacobians' leader "Henry Gale," even though his name is Ben Linus (they now call him Ben Linus). Ben Linus says he is working with Jacob, but in fact (it will turn out) he is working with another entity, who locals call "the black smoke" or "the monster" but who I call "The Adversary" (nobody else does this, either).

There was an event at the end of Season 2, called The Event (I think?) that basically blew all of time and space right through the sphincter of the universe, which (it will turn out) is what the island is. Since then, the island, which had been unfindable, has been findable, and you'll never guess what but it's now been found. The guy who found it is a man named Charles Widmore, who everyone calls "Charles Widmore." Widmore sent a freighter to the island, which everyone calls "the freighter." Ben Linus thinks Charles Widmore means to kill everyone, but Ben Linus lies all the time. This has led to a lot of consternation and conversation, and the Oceanics have split into two factions: the "let's get rescued!" faction, led by surgeon/drinker/angry man Jack Shephard, and the "let's run and hide!" faction, led by hunter/mystic/box factory employee John Locke.

Now a helicopter from the freighter has landed on the island, and you're all caught up! (Kind of.)

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O B S E R V A T I O N

This episode opens on a submarine expedition that has been sent to search for sunken treasure, but instead happens upon ... Oceanic 815! Sunken to the bottom of the ocean! This is confusing, because we know that the plane crashed on the island (see above), but this scene doesn't come totally out of the blue. A member of the freighter crew named Naomi (now deceased) parachuted onto the island midway through Season 3, and from her we learned not only about the existence of the freighter, but also that Oceanic 815 was found and the general population of the planet (Earth) therefore believes that everyone aboard is dead. The citizens of Earth within the world of LOST made this reasonable assumption based on that fact, and I don't blame them. (They're wrong, though.) The citizens of Earth within our world, who were watching LOST, also used this to believe that it means everyone was dead the whole time. (They're also wrong, but I do blame them for that, because it will be stated right in the show exactly how and why they're wrong in future episodes, which means that people who believe this just weren't paying attention.)

I'll have more to say about this in the Belief section. Unless I figure out something about something during this watch-through of the show, I think it will go down as one of the biggest mistakes, or at least one of the biggest missed opportunities, the LOST writers make in the entire run of the series.

Man what a lot of info we're getting this episode. Remember when I used to be able to burn through these things three at a time?

So it goes.

Episode 2: CONFIRMED DEAD (Daniel, Miles, Frank, Charlotte, Naomi): This episode introduces us to four new characters, who I've listed in the parenthetical in order of importance, and also gives us a bit of backstory on a recently-deceased new character—Naomi—that serves as a bit of a fond (or perfunctory) farewell.

Let's start with Faraday, since the episode does. We see him sitting in pajamas looking disheveled, watching footage of the "Oceanic" ocean floor discovery. He's weeping. An unseen caretaker asks him why he's crying. He replies, with what I believe is sincere confusion, that he doesn't know.

Smash cut to Faraday in a helicopter that looks like it's going to crash. He leaps and parachutes into the jungle, where he finds Kate and Jack, just like we saw at the end of the last episode. Faraday, who seems a lot more with it than he did in the first scene, says he's there to rescue them, but there are many reasons for Kack to doubt him, including the fact that a "George Minkowski" from the freighter doesn't want to talk on speaker in their presence, and also the fact that Faraday has a gun, and also that he is acting like the most skittish nervous guilty dude in existence. (Sample quote "the ... light. It's strange out here, isn't it? It's like it ... it doesn't scatter quite right.") Free hint, Daniel: don't ever play poker.

Faraday lets Jate know he has a transponder, which will lead him to his fellow helicopter-ride enthusiasts from the freighter. On the way, they come across a trunk thrown from the helicopter as ballast, which is full of hazmat suits and gas masks. (This will be explained later, so I'll save it for that episode.) When pressed Faraday admits "rescuing you and your people? can't really say it's our primary objective." When asked what is the primary objective, Faraday sort of wanders away. This does not increase the overall trust levels.

Eventually the three arrive at a rocky beach we've seen occasionally before (Desmond killed Inman there, for example). There's a parachutist lying there, seemingly unconscious. But when Jack reaches them, this figure leaps up and points a gun at them, demanding to know why they killed Naomi and where she is. This is our second freighter person: Miles! He's snarky! Like a spare Sawyer! You're gonna love him!

Miles-back: Miles is a perpetually angry dude who we quickly learn works as a ghostbuster. No, seriously. He shows up at a nice lady's house and exorcises the ghost of her murdered grandson. He's a hard-ass about his fee, but when he uses his skill (he has equipment but it's just for show) to convince the ghost to not only leave but lead him to hidden fat stacks of drug cash, he offers the old lady a 50% discount. That's our Miles: pissy but good-hearted deep down—but also essentially self-serving even deeper down.

Island time: The Miles gun situation works itself out. Kackaday take Miles to Naomi's body, where he's able to confirm their story that they didn't kill her, Locke did. Everyone acts like a bunch of Fonzies again. They're just about to go find the third member of their party, who Miles says is named "Charlotte" ... when Sayid and Juliet show up to take the hostage-takers hostage. Tables turned!

Charlotte-back. She's at an archeological excavation in the Tunisian Sahara, where a polar bear skeleton has been found. Charlotte barges onsite and whiteladies and bribes to get access, then does some pretty goofy excavation that involves shoving aside some loose gravel, and finds ... a Dharma collar emblazoned with a Hydra station logo. More hints of the fact that the island moves, as we'll soon learn, and evidence of my belief, mentioned in earlier entries, that it has dimensional qualities that actually allow it to orbit around and sometimes even through the earth, and sometimes tosses people at different points along its path.

Island-time: Charlotte's upside-down. Her parachute caught on a snag hanging over a river. She drops into the river and comes across ... Locke and his crew (a group including Hurley, Sawyer, the captive Ben Linus, as well as Ben's adopted/abducted daughter Alex, her boyfriend Karl, and her biological mother, Rousseau), who take her into their custody.

Locke and his gang have been walking around and arguing over whether or not to kill Ben while they have the chance. That's not very heroic, but in their defense, he is a murderous little weasel who is certain to eventually turn the tables on them. The group has been heading out to the barracks, but they're taking a shortcut, per Locke, who has been getting instruction from "Walt, but Taller." Locke wants more instructions, and for that he says needs to go to a certain cabin. Hurley, who has himself recently seen the cabin, interjects "hey but isn't the cabin back that way" until he remembers that nobody knows he's seen the cabin; and covers for himself rather than explain what he means. This is interesting, since Hurley isn't normally a secretive type. I went on at length about all this last time; for now I'll just note that this is evidence for my position that the cabin's location on the island is unstable ... it, like the island, moves, in other words. Hurley's secrecy also perhaps suggests that the cabin has a certain Adversary-like corrupting influence.

Somewhere in there, Ben says "Karl" to Karl in a way that completely sums up the essence of Karl, which is not important, exactly, but I have to mention it, because it is freaking hilarious. I can't explain. You have to see it for yourself.

Frank-back! He's an aging hippy-drunky type (we see him in what appears to be Margaritaville) who, upon seeing the footage of the "Oceanic" discovery, immediately calls some unspecified authorities to say that the details seen in the footage of the pilot's body (which is being televised, in a way that is convenient to the plot if not particularly believable) has convinced him that the whole thing is a fake. He's right about that, but never mind that for now, because he reveals that ... he was supposed to be the pilot of Oceanic Flight 815!

Island-time: Turns out Frank is the pilot of the helicopter we've seen. Frank climbs a hill, and sees Mikail's cow, who has been free-range ever since first the Flame station, and then later Mikhail, exploded.

Jacksayjulmileskataday find Frank after he shoots a flare, and he reveals that he landed the helicopter, safe and sound! With many pressing matters now settled, The Gang Asks Miles What The Ding-Dong They Are All Doing Here. Miles reveals that they have arrived to find and get Benjamin Linus.

Naomi-back: Naomi meets with Matthew Abaddon, last seen scaring Hurley. They're in the sort of abandoned office building where nefarious schemes get plotted on TV. We learn that: 1) Naomi is the leader of a mission that she describes as a "high risk covert op in unstable territory," 2) that she is skeptical both about the idea that the "Oceanic" discovery is real and the fitness for such a mission of the four new characters we have met. Abaddon insists that there were no survivors of Oceanic 815, and that, yes, these four are crucial to the plan.

Back to Charlotte: she's asking the group a lot of questions when Ben—who clearly doesn't want her to learn the answers—grabs Karl's gun and shoots her. She's saved by a bulletproof vest, but the attempted murder makes Locke reconsider his position on the whole "should we kill Ben?" thing. To stave off his incipient execution, Ben offers to tell Locke many secrets. Locke immediately demands "what is the monster?" All I'll point out here about that is that Locke apparently doesn't know the answer and it's clearly right at the front of his mind as the number one mystery he'd like to know. I offer this as more evidence that Locke has been communing regularly with The Adversary, and has some inkling that as an entity It might not mean well.

Ben says he doesn't know what the monster is (which may be true, but we'll find out soon enough it is a subject that certainly does know many things about). Desperate to not get a bullet in the head, Ben reveals that he has encyclopedic knowledge of Charlotte, including her middle name (Staples) and her last name, (Lewis), which is a clever little reference to Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis and a sly early hint that we're dealing with alternate dimensions. Locke wants to know how Ben knows all this. Ben says something that is true—even though, based on what we'll learn, it seems unlikely that it is the reason he came by the information:

Ben answers: "Because I have a man on their boat."

End of Episode 2.

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B E L I E F

When we observe around here, we follow it up by believing. Let's believe.

1) The fake Oceanic. Ok, so the expedition for sunken treasure that discovered the fake Oceanic 815 wreck was sent by the same person who sunk the fake Oceanic 815 in the first place, that is to say British billionaire asshole and father of Desmond's true love Penny, Charles Widmore. There's no belief needed here: Widmore will spell this out for us and we'll eventually be shown very directly that Widmore dug up a cemetery to load the plane with corpses.

It's worth noting that when it comes to expeditions, Charles Widmore is clearly not above lying to the people who go on the mission about the nature of the mission, and we might apply this lesson to the freighter mission.

The question is: why? What purpose does it serve to go through such lengths to make the world think that a bunch of people who the world clearly would have already assumed were dead were dead?

I believe the idea in the LOST writers' minds was probably that he was trying to convince some other faction of island-aware people, who would have had some reason to believe the Oceanic people were alive, that there were no Oceanic survivors. Who? And why? I can guess, and someday maybe I will, but as far as I recall this won't ever get explained, and even if it does, it didn't matter enough for me to remember. I'm pretty sure we never see any other faction of island-aware people fooled by this ruse.

So here's what I really believe: I believe it was a mistake. I believe the writers made a big goof here. The way answers are revealed on this show is so deliberately circuitous and back-door, requiring such a high degree of attention paid, and the presence of an Oceanic Flight 815 on the floor of the Pacific is so suggestive of the incorrect but massively popular theory that they were dead all along, that the only people fooled by Widmore's ruse, who took it as evidence that the Oceanic survivors actually didn't survive, were the show's audience here in the real world.

It's just confusing. Also, it's an opportunity missed, because this could have been evidence for the general theory (for which there nevertheless remains a lot of evidence) that the event at the end of Season 2, when Desmond turned the failsafe key, actually moved them into a different branch of multidimensional reality, one in which they had never come to the island because they had all died, which would have tied together a great many things very neatly all at once.

Instead: this. Sort of a fizzle of a piffle of a huh? Oh well.

Let's deal with all these new characters in reverse order of importance:

2) Naomi Dorrit. Not much to say here, as Naomi doesn't have any further impact on the story. Abaddon is bullshitting her, for what it's worth. I discussed last time a theory that she might have been sent deliberately as "the sacrifice the island demanded," which might explain why she was needed for the mission. The only other thing we learn from her section is that a) Matthew Abaddon was directly involved in putting it all together, and b) Charles Widmore finds it vitally important that these four new characters go to the island despite their lack of qualification for the ostensible mission, for reasons that he's not being forthcoming about, and we might wonder why that is.

3) Charlotte Staples Lewis. To start, all four of these characters have a pre-existing connection to the island. We'll eventually discover that Charlotte was a child of the Dharma Initiative. Not much of import happens with her in this series, unfortunately, but she will travel through time soon, and Charles Widmore would certainly know this, for reasons I'll get into before we're done today. I think that Widmore needed her to be a part of the mission because he happens to know, from his knowledge of past events, that she exists in the island's past, and she won't be able to exist in the island's past if she doesn't go to the island now to travel back to the island's past. In other words, she has to go on his mission because he knows she went on his mission. (Did that make sense? If so, be very afraid.)

4) Frank Lapidus. This guy is going to factor into the story more than Charlotte, but his ties to the island are most tenuous. He's not going to travel through time; however, he is going to eventually be instrumental in other characters traveling through time, and Widmore would know this. The fact that he was supposed to be the Oceanic pilot suggests to me that he might be somebody that Jacob called to the island as a candidate (about which much much much more later), and I believe this is our answer to the question-that-doesn't-really-need-to-be-answered "why could the black smoke kill the pilot way back in Season 1 Episode 1 when It seems unable to kill other characters?" I believe it's because Frank, as the intended pilot, is one of Jacob's candidates, and the unintended replacement was not. The island doesn't let candidates die while they remain potential candidates; others are fair game. (I also believe this is why so many people survived a crash wherein a plane broke apart hundreds of feet in the air, which should have had 100% fatalities).

3) Miles Strom. This character is going to be a very big part of the story, mostly because the producers realized that the actor is awesome and the audience wanted to see a lot more of him. Miles is important here because he represents the most direct acknowledgement yet that, in the world of this show, ghosts are real. Up until this point, the ghosts have been presented as yet another mystery, one that might have some other explanation.

Nope. Ghosts.

It's important, insofar as suggestions of the island's existence as a nexus of cosmic power has been, through the Swan Station enter-the-numbers plotline, been foregrounded up to this point. However (and very frustratingly to a certain type of fan), its existence as a nexus of spiritual energy is going to be even more important at the end of the day. Some important groundwork is being done in the character of Miles, a man attuned to the supernatural even more directly, perhaps, than is are other island mystics like Hurley.

Miles also has ties to the island. Like Charlotte, he's a child of Dharma who will be time-travelling soon. Unlike Charlotte, his father is somebody we've seen before.

And speaking of that ...

2) Daniel Faraday. Where do we start with Daniel Faraday? Let's start with his strange line about the light scattering wrong, a phenomenon which will never come up again as far as I remember. Is it just Faraday being weird? Maybe, but I think not. Faraday is a scientist, and for reasons I am not going to go all the way into right now, I believe he's one who arrives to the island with a certain pre-existing understanding of it, albeit a limited one. I think Faraday might be seeing something that he noticed because he was looking for it. I don't think there's much that's load-bearing to the plot or the mythology here; I just think it's an early hint at what I'll call the ultra-dimensional nature of the island, and a very early allusion—one of the first—to the light at its heart. Anyway: physics here are not the same as physics elsewhere, suggests the physicist.

OK, next: why is Faraday crying? And why doesn't he know why he's crying? We're never told, but as somebody who has watched the whole show, I have some beliefs around this.

To tell you what I believe about this, I'm going to spoil so much stuff, you guys. If you are first-timers, maybe you should just bookmark this and come back later.

All these new characters have previous ties to the island, but none so much as Mister Captain Doctor Daniel Faraday. Daniel Faraday is a scientist who studies physics, but who most specifically studies the physics of time. He is going to go back in time soon, along with many other characters, where he will join the Dharma Initiative and discover many important things about what the island is and how it works, and he will (and this is crucial) write all these things down in his journal. That journal will fall into the hands of a couple of people who, during Dharma days, were the leaders of the Jacobians, and the knowledge that Faraday's diary gives them quite literally shapes the future. We'll get into how all this plays out as we get into Season 5, but it's safe to say that there is no other character in this show who has a greater influence upon the actual events that happen within this story, past and future, than does Daniel Faraday. If he hadn't arrived on this island, just now, when he did, the entire universe would be a very different place indeed, and it might not exist. He's a big honking deal, as I said last time.

And Faraday's parents knew this, because his parents are the onetime leaders of the Jacobians, were in fact the ones into whose hands his journal fell. And, tragically, the journal fell into their hands when Faraday's mother killed him, not knowing who he was, because why would she?

And then Faraday's parents would have read the journal, and realized who she had killed. And then, realizing how crucially important it would be to the future of the universe for their as-yet unborn son to come to the island and be killed by his mother, they took steps to make sure that Daniel Faraday would become a physicist, and come to the island, and die.

And that's why Charles Widmore knew who he had to recruit for this freighter mission. It's why he recruited Charlotte Staples Lewis, and Frank Lapidus, and Miles Strom. It's why he recruited his son, Daniel Faraday.

In fact, I believe that, while Widmore does indeed want to recapture the island for himself and extract Ben Linus, and maybe even wants to kill everyone on the island, the main reason he sends the freighter is because he knows that there has to be a freighter with a mission, and he knows that the mission has to bring to the island certain people who will go to the past and from there shape the future.

And this I believe explains why Faraday is crying but can't explain why to his caretaker. The reason that Faraday has a caretaker is because, in his studies of time, he's fallen victim to a time-displacement disease that will become rather important rather soon. Those who have this disease have, by exposure to quantum energy, become unstuck in time; their consciousness jumps all over their history. They see flashes before their eyes of things that happened, or things that haven't happened yet. And, as they jump, they remember things they hadn't known yet, forget things they already knew, as their consciousness, not acclimated for multidimensional data, starts to tear itself apart. We've already seen how this works, in the character of Desmond Hume. We'll see it again soon.

I think Daniel Faraday is crying when he sees the Oceanic wreckage because, for just a moment, lost in his fog of present past and future, he "remembers" ever so briefly that this is the inciting event that will lead his father to send him to the island to be killed by his mother.

I believe it, because it fits perfectly with everything we'll be told, but I also believe it, because it makes the story amazing.

What better reason is there to believe than that?

L O S T

Next Time: Oh Sayid, Can You See?

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. Why wouldn't he listen to Taller Ghost Walt?