Holy bleep! That was great.
It was every bit as good as promised. Better even! I
sat mesmerized for the whole 2 hours, afraid to move and miss something, and I don't think I did:
Christian, check.
Freighter blowing, check.
Creepy underground ice cave complete with hieroglyphics, check.
Frozen Donkey Wheel, check.
Island moving, check.
Chopper crash, check.
Resue, check.
Reunion of Desmond and Penny, check.
Fake ad for Octagon Global Recruiting, check.
Walt, check.
Claire, check.
The start of the regrouping of the Oceanic 6, check.
Locke in the casket, check.
Wow.
So much happened, I hardly know where to begin. Might as well start with my favorite plot line, the Orchid Station, or more specifcally, what lay beneath it. The whole "Frozen
Donkey Wheel" scene was incredible. The ice cave and the giant gear wheel, glyphs everywhere. It would seem to indicate
that the island has a long history. There was either an ancient race of men, or some otherworldly beings, there quite
some time ago.
A connection between the Orchid and the Swan?
In the orientation film, Halliwax says there's a deposit of negatively charged exotic matter
behind the bunny transporter, so I think that Ben was opening an ancient lid or stopper that governs the flow of
energy from the deposit.
It struck me that the Swan Station had something encased in cement below it. Perhaps it
was covering another, smaller, deposit of the "exotic stuff". This could explain the button. The
cement stopper might have been less sturdy than the Donkey Wheel stopper, amd needed to have the pressure buildup bled
off every 108 minutes. I have to assume that keeping the exotic matter shielded is critical to keeping the island stable
in time.
The whole Ben martyrdom thing in this scene was great also, and we can be reasonably sure
that the next stop for Ben is the Tunesian dessert. And how about the island disappearing?
Poof, nothing but a circular ripple.
I don't think it just shifted in time, as it would seem that even if time on the island
moved forward, there would still be a past version of the island that you would have seen.
So, who's left on the island?
There's the Others, including some of the original 815 survivors, and their new leader,
Locke. Claire's a maybe. Sawyer's on the beach along with Juliet, Miles and Charlotte, and Daniel and his passengers
may have been sucked up along with the departing island.
The interesting thing is that because the island "relocated" right after the freighter blew,
no one saw the chopper crash or Penny's boat. Had Ben waited to spin the wheel of fortune, a lot more people could
have been rescued. After all, once he killed Keamy and triggered his dead man's switch, moving the island lost some of
it's urgency. He could have moved the island after Penny departed and still acheived what he wanted.
With Ben's apparent foreknowledge of events, I'm surprised he didn't know about Penny's
imminent arrival. Maybe he did, and he knows more about her and her intentions than we do, or maybe he just didn't
care.
Either way, as far as the beach tribe knows, all the others died in the explosion. They're
totally unaware that anyone actually got rescued.
Of course, there's still a chance that Jin and some of the others from the freighter
were blown free of the wreckage also. If so, I think they were sucked along with the island like Daniels boat.
