I hope you have a very large humidor filled with many, many cigars! 
Some thoughts:
Why does everyone assume the Others knew who was on the plane, or somehow planned who would be on the plane, and wanted to bring it down? Seems just as likely they may have noticed the plane crash, then said to themselves, “hey, might as well go grab all the Good People who survived.” After all, we don’t know what they mean when they say “good person” or “bad person.” It could be that 50% of people are “good” and 50% “bad”, so they know in just about any mix of people there will be some “good” ones.
I think everyone’s a bit off base with Charlie wandering back to camp and not caring too much about Locke and Eko. I could be wrong here, but wasn’t Charlie still down there, right next to Eko, when Desmond turned the key? So whatever happened to Eko should have happened to Charlie. I think we might see in next season’s premiere that the key just turned everything off, and they were all OK, and they all met up and said “well, see you back and camp.” Hence Charlie not being too concerned. Even if they’re not OK, I got the impression we were supposed to think Charlie knew more about what happened than what we saw on screen.
It seems clear that Kelvin was indeed an official Dharma person. That makes me wonder if his talk about “hostiles” was really a put-on in front of Desmond, or what I think is more likely, that the Others are not Dharma. If they are–and if they believe it’s necessary for the button to be pushed–why would they have left it unmanned by their own people?
Does anyone else wonder why the Dharma initiative built its stations as underground bunkers? It’s got to be hard enough to get any sort of construction equipment onto a tropical island and into the middle of a jungle, but I would think excavation equipment would be especially difficult. I don’t imagine there’ll turn out to be a reason for this, though. Underground bunkers just lend more to the story; they’re more mysterious.
Yes! One of the best camp action made for TV movies of all timee. And I hear there is a sequel in the works…
If we assume that The Others are at least peripherally involved with Dharma, then “each one of us was brought here for a reason”, as the official “Lost” website has been telling us all season.
Desmond was awakened by the sound of the 4 minute alarm… he quickly entered the numbers … he heard a noise and discoverd Kelvin dressing to go outside…asked what was up…was told to stay in the hatch… Kelvin went outside… Desmond followed to the boat… kills Kelvin… runs to the hatch (scared I presume becuase of killing Kelvin, not becuase of time)… gets to the hatch the alarm is going off… gets to the keyboard timer as it goes to defcon penguin… penis ensues… airplane(s) crash… he gets the numbers in and resets the system.
At most, 112 minutes between… atleast 108… probably less than 100 given time to dress and have the conversation.
[Rik’s comment is in answer to John Mace’s comment that “And I’ll second the person who said a native Spanish speaker would not mistake Portugese for Spanish (unless, perhaps, the native speaker spoke the Galician dialect of Spanish).”]
I was listening carefully in that scene, too, and I really really thought they were speaking Spanish. I’m not a native speaker of Spanish, but I can usually follow it. A friend of mine often speaks Brazilian Portuguese to her mother, and I can’t follow more than random nouns and adjectives. (Maybe continental Portuguese sounds different…?)
But if it was Spanish, it was an accent I didn’t recognize. Not Mexican, not Castilian, not like the one Argentine I’ve heard. It sounded very wet and squishy. Rather pretty, but not like anything I’d ever heard.
Can any Spanish or Portuguese speakers here place the accent?
Here’s a nifty little WAG for you. They built the hatches into preexisting caves. The eliminated the need to excavate, all they had to do was fortify them and install facilities, and it provided for a more durable, secure and climate controled environment than traditional construction.
As the boat was pulling away from the dock, I was waiting for Walt to ask Michael why Jack, Kate, and Sawyer were on their knees, bound and gagged and looking like they were about to be executed. I would have loved to hear Michael try to explain that away.
“I needed my boy back!”
It’s Michael’s way of saying “9/11”.
But it looks like the island might just have WMDs.
(bolding mine)
Not just take out the monitor (as long as the keyboard and computer are functional, they could still enter the numbers, right?). That bothered me. Desmond’s look of “NOOO!” and I’m thinking, “So enter it anyway! You just can’t see what you enter, so what? Just, you know, be careful.”
Yep. And if I were Walt, I’d be going “Turn the fuck around, Dad! We have to save them!”
I’m pretty sure that was an old school computer which had the monitor and CPU built into the same cabinet.
Since the Weapon of Magnetic Destruction[sup]TM[/sup] didn’t go off when Locke was locked down we can assume that Fenry really did enter the numbers. And from that we can deduce that he (and, presumably the rest of the others) either wanted the button pushed or had no interest in it. If they wanted the WMD to go off that would have been a perfect opportunity.
Just an observation.
Interestingly, Sawyer says “Let’s roll” as they head off on their trek. Famous last words of the guy on UA flight 93 before it… crashed!
There were quite a few NUMBERS ALERT in this episode.
Desmond’s letters to Penny-- her address contained “23”, “4”, and “8”
Number of toes on the statue: 4
Cost of Desmond’s coffee at Starbucks: $4
Amount Desmond thought he needed for the boat: $42 Thousand
Number of people Michael had to bring to The Others: 4
Time of day of Desmond’s system failure: 4:16
But oddly, the day of the plane crash is 9/22/04, which only contains one of The Numbers. And none of The Numbers in the compass heading Fenry gave to Micahel-- 325.
Are you serious? You’re a young kid who was just rescued from a group of savages by your father, and as you’re sailing away to what you assume is safe harbor you’re going to try and convince your unarmed and outmatched dad to turn around in a boat (which is hardly moving fast enough to catch the enemy off guard) to try and save four people who are bound and gagged from a gang of how many people armed with rifles? I think not. You’re going to sit on your hands like a good little boy and be quiet while your mind overloads with everything that’s going on
I assume the characters being named for famous philosophers is just a little writer joke, huh? I mean, we have John Locke and David Hume becoming friends, with a Rousseau on the island as well. And there was a Kate Austen, who was an anarchist who came along just after Hume and Rousseau’s time.
Anyway… Are we assuming the hatch was destroyed? I don’t think so. There was no explosion. Just that blinding light from the sky, and the hatch door falling from the sky after everything stopped.
My thinking was that the electromagnet was some kind of drive, and the hatch may actually have been a spaceship or something (exctraterrestrials are supposed to be part of the Dharma thing). What if pushing ‘the numbers’ is actually a form of deadman switch? As long as you enter them, on a periodic interval, you stay where you are, but if you stop, the hatch seals up, and heads back from whence it came. Maybe what we saw was a dimension being opened up, or some force from the sky pulling on the hatch. The blown hatch cover, being loose on top, was the first thing to go. But then Desmond managed to switch on the abort, and it all stopped - and the hatch cover came falling back out of the sky.
Or maybe the season will open with a giant hole where the hatch was, but Locke and company will emerge from the hatch - on another island. Something like that. “See you in another life.” Desmond said before going down to turn the key. The same thing he said to Jack when he met him running the stadium stairs.
As for the plane crash, maybe when you enter the numbers after a system failure everything returns to normal slowly. So the airplane was caught in whateer the anomaly was, and torn apart, but when Desmond shut it down properly (instead of aborting), the plane’s parts were simply lowered to the ground slowly. Thus the survivors.
And it seems to me that Desmond’s girlfriend knows all about this. She knows what will happen if you don’t enter the numbers. She’s hired people to scan for anomalies for years, waiting for an ‘incident’ so she could pinpoint the location of the island. And why would she do that? Because her dad arranged to have Desmond stranded on the island. She figured that out, and wanted to find him. Libby worked for girlfriend’s dad, and made sure that Desmond would have a sailboat for this ‘race’ - and that he would be grabbed and dragged to the island.
Do any of those theories pass the smell test?
I’d say it definitely wasn’t Spanish of any dialect that I’ve heard. It was recognizably Portuguese, and I’d be prepared to say Brazilian (BP) rather than European Portuguese (EP). Like at least one Doper upthread, I had originally thought that this scene was a commercial (snow? Russians playing chess?) and had already switched to “ad-tuning-out mode”, but something about the audio was sufficiently compelling to draw my attention back to the TV screen with the thought “That’s Portuguese!”. My claim of Brazilian (BP) rather than European (EP) is something of a “negative ID” since I can recognize EP better than BP, but the final syllables of words sounded far too distinct to be from Portugal.
There are definitely native Portuguese speakers on the SDMB: Rashak Mani is Brazilian, and I know there’s someone who’s a native of Portugal. Plus, Chefguy used to live in Portugal, although he’s not a native speaker AFAIK. I’m not sure that we’re going to find anyone on the SDMB who is (a) fluent in Portuguese, (b) watches Lost, and (c) receives Lost on the US schedule (and thus might have seen the latest episode). Until a truly fluent speaker comes in, I’m going to stake the claim that it’s definitely Portuguese, and probably Brazilian. There’s also the possibility that one or other of the actors has an aberrant Portuguese accent (cf. Sam Toomey’s widow, whom Hurley meets in the Outback near Kalgoorlie in the Episode Numbers, and has an accent that is recognizably fake to anyone familiar with Australian accents).
The fact that it’s daylight and mountainous in the snowy final scene (which should be taking place during December according to the “September 22nd crash” schedule), but nighttime at Penelope’s home (presumably in the UK), suggests that our Portuguese-speaking friends are most likely in Antarctica, IMHO.
Except the tail section definitely did not come down slowly. It bulleted out of the sky and into the ocean.
Then why was Kelvin trying to repair the boat and escape?
Beacuse he was waiting for a replacement … “Are you him?” his first question to Desmond, a replacement who never came, Dharma wern’t keeping their side of the bargain/honouring their side of the contract so why should he ?
On the mystery language front I’m heading more towards Portuguese than Spanish too (& Brazilian is more easily understood by Spanish speakers than pure Portuguese.)