A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

BUT I WAS SO MUCH OLDER THEN; I'M YOUNGER THAN THAT NOW: Since West Coast is handling Lost tonight and East Coast gets ants-in-the-pants whenever it has to wait for a thread, consider this an open thread for discussion of tonight's Lost. I'll update tonight.

Meanwhile, I'll pose this question, which may or may not have anything to do with tonight's episode: What is the Oceanic 6 5 4's current goal? They came back to the island because otherwise, as Jack said in drunk-bearded angst, everybody on that island would die. Now, as far as Jack & Co. know, Sawyer, Juliet, and Miles are safe and happy in 1977 (it's clear from the last episode that they don't want to leave), Faraday is in 1977 too, Desmond and Aaron are safe in the real world 30 years later, Charlotte and Locke are already dead, most of the remaining Oceanic passengers (including Rose and Bernard) have to be presumed dead, given what Sawyer should have told Jack about the flaming arrows and the trip wires and the time-travel nosebleeds, and Claire was kidnapped and presumed dead before the freighter tsuris. Jack doesn't have any reason to believe that anybody he knows is on the island in 2009, when whatever is going to happen to the island might happen. Even if he suspects that the plane landed on the island, the group of current islanders would consist only of Lapidas (who he knew only for the duration of a helicopter flight, a boat ride, and half a plane trip), and Sun, plus Ben and the Others (who he hates) and the Ajira passengers (for whom he is not responsible, since the plane presumably would have gone down with or without the O6 passengers). So, apart from guilt over dragging Sun back in or some strong encouragement from Jin, why wouldn't Jack, Kate, and Hurley either settle into a comfortable life on the island or convince LaFleur to think of a way to send them back to the mainland, where they could buy Apple and bet on the US Olympic hockey team? Who is around to convince them that they have any reason to care about anything but their own welfare? I realize that events will contrive to frustrate their idyllic lives, but at this point, if I were Jack, I wouldn't be looking for any reasons to rock the boat.

ETA: Two other non-spoilery thought on an episode that neither posed big new questions nor answered big old ones.

First, this show's time structure is moving gleefully toward entropy. There were whole seasons devoted to a single structure: Present/flashback. The first big break was Desmond's lucid-dream flashback. Then we got a shorter, but still longish, dose of flash-forwards. This season, as Sepinwall has noted, we have had multiple time signatures -- on/off island; three years apart on the island; thirty years apart on the island. This episode's structure was, on the surface, pretty straightforward (other than the opening flashback): 1977/flashback to immediately before Ajira. What I found interesting about it, though, is that the story made very little sense without our knowledge of things that happened out of the chronology -- what really happened to Locke; what was going to happen with Ben and Richard; what happened to Sayid both in Iraq and on the island the first time. I really hope Cuse and Lindelof keep pushing this -- it's a great way to keep people on their toes when doing an otherwise straightforward story.

Second, they're clearly not trying to pick up new viewers. To people who have seen every episode, this was pretty straightforward. But can you imagine trying to sort this out if it were your first episode?