Um–Dave’s last words to Hurley in the institution were “If you don’t come with me man, you’ll NEVER get out of here.”
They wouldn’t pull some horrible bullshit like having everything from Hurley winning the lottery onward just be a hallucination of Hurley’s would they?
(I know they dismissed the possibilty, but still…)
whoops totally posted in the wrong forum. I blame Microsoft for confusing me.
Hell–what if it’s all in LIBBY’S mind?
On that note, remember when Ben told Locke, in regards to Cooper, “YOU brought him here”? I wonder if they’re ever going to address that.
In the last episode, Ben said to Danielle, “whenever you hear whispers, run for your life” or something to that effect. Is that the first time we’ve seen a character explicitly acknowledge the whispers? Have the producers said they’re going to explain the whispers?
I think the whispers are things that the BSM has heard through the timey-wimey weirdness and is just kind of letting out accidentally.
As for “YOU brought him here”, that’s more of Ben’s double talk. Locke being who he was and Ben wanting to prove that Locke couldn’t kill him as part of his Other-Initiation is what brought him there. Without Locke, Cooper wouldn’t have been there, because Ben wouldn’t have needed a tool against Locke.
-Joe
The whispers have definitely shown up at times when there’s no obvious sign of the BSM, and instead are simply announcing the immanent appearance of an Other or Others.
One case in point: Goodwin’s widowed wife appearing to Juliet in Season 4 after Juliet hears the whispers. Now, it’s possible that she’s still just a vision of course, but she seems, and Juliet seems to assume, that she’s a live Other. On the other hand (heh), she is ultra creepy, and manages to vanish into thin air when Juliet and Jack turn their backs. And she claims to be carrying a message from Ben, when we know that Ben is locked up at the time. She claims that “Ben is right where he wants to be” which, if she is a BSM effect, could be the BSM’s way of saying that it knows what Ben wants or needs without actually asking him.
But you have to love him wholly… Zen-Locke is extra awesome because he was borne of WeenieLocke.
Besides, he had a lot to feel shitty about.
You make a good point, Obi-Wan. 
And rewatching season 2, (I’m like 3 eps from the end of the season) there are actually THREE Lockes and WeenieLocke isn’t the problem. It’s Whiney-PetulantLocke that’s the problem. WeenieLocke is like Bruce Banner. ZenLocke is The Hulk. PetulantLocke exists between the other two and it’s HIM I find annoying. WeenieLocke is a genuinely good person who is deeply shat-upon by life and the world. And he still tries to do the right thing. PetulantLocke just throws tantrums.
Also: On the “Does the Island want The Doomsday Button pushed?” question, I believe the answer is “no”–through a series of Island-sent dreams, Eko and Locke are led to the Pearl where they learn that The Swan is just a Skinner-box and Locke wants to stop pushing The Doomsday Button as a result. Eko claims it’s just a test, but Eko (IIRC) is killed in the real near future, so what does he know? The Island’s goal seems to be trying to get Locke to stop obsessing about the Dharma crap and get to the real stuff.
Finally: Regarding The Pearl? Th’ fuck? We know the Doomsday Button is real–when it’s not hit, it knocks planes out of the sky and leaves a crater. So what’s the point of The Pearl?
I’m confused about the Pearl too. When we first saw Season 5 Dharmaville, I assumed that Miles was on monitor duty in the Pearl, and I concluded that the Pearl hadn’t always been a crazy psyche experiment, but was once used as a regular monitoring station. But as far as I can tell now, that room and its jail cell was just down in a Dharmaville basement (which raises the question of why it, especially the cell, was never used in Seasons 3-4!) and not the Pearl. The Pearl has a hatch and ladder. The monitor room just has a staircase.
This is buttressed by the fact that Radzinsky, who is apparently in charge of designing many of the stations, doesn’t know what the Pearl is (i.e. that’s why it’s a question mark on his blast door map).
I can buy that the Pearl was in fact built as a psychological experiment, but I can’t quite see how that’s going to fit into the story yet. Obviously at some point, someone is going to be scribbling into notebooks. And if the notebooks once really did go somewhere, rather into a neglected pile, then it’s likely that that person remained on duty after the purge.
I hope it’s that wormy, suspicious ass in Dharmaville!
There are only a few things that I really, really want to know:
*What happened to the people (the kids, etc.) who were kidnapped? Where the hell are Rose and Bernard?
*How did Locke’s dad get to the island? (I know that someone said above that it was said in an extra on the DVD that he was abducted and brought there by the others, but I want some elaboration that is an actual part of the show)
Things that I want to know, but don’t hold much hope for finding out:
*What was there any point at all to the season 3 episode, “Stranger in a Strange Land?” (the Bai Ling/tattoo episode)
*Why did Jack’s wife have Christian’s number in her phone book? Was she having the affair with him?
*Why was Locke wet after he blew up the submarine? (That, I’m almost certain, was just a production gaffe or something, but there was speculation at the time that something else was going on there.)
*Why was Libby in the mental institution?
I know that there’s more, but I’m not going to remember it until after I post this. Also, this article from Entertainment Weekly a couple months ago gave me some of hope that a lot of the questions will actually get answered (be careful, though, because there might be some spoilers in there, although nothing too major) – even the ones that I’ve basically written off. I hope that’s true.
And Vincent, dammit!
Also, why was Waaaaaaaaaaaaalt so important that they were willing to let Ben be killed rather than trade him (only to let Waaaaaaaaaaalt go in return for Jack/Sawyer/Hurley(?)/Kate)?
And watching these eps again, “Good person” thing can’t mean “good person for otherization”–Ben specifically tells Anna-Lucia that she’s a bad person. So what kind of criteria allows pre-grown up Sawyer and Ben (fergodsake) to be “good people” and, say Rose and Bernard to not be?
I’d also forgotten just how much I hated both the actor (who has one (1) mode: whiney and pissed combined) and the character of Michael. I just watched the ep where he murders Libby and Anna-Lucia and the one after that. Prick.
I didn’t love him on Lost & what I’ve heard about his reaction to being “killed” on the show wasn’t good. (Although I don’t keep up with celebrity gossip as much as some around here.)
But Harold Perrineau will always be Mercutio to me. So I wish him well.
This one we pretty much know: along with the stewardess, they’re Others now, and at the Temple.
Some of the flashbacks in Season 2/3 are the weakest parts of the show, because the writers had sort of run out of core background on the characters stories but still needed flashbacks to flesh out the character’s motivations in the present (which is a really powerful storytelling device, at least when the flashbacks were interesting). In this case, Jack’s tattoo story mostly played the role of re-enforcing the theme of Jack being something of an outcast from anything he tried to join up with: a stranger in a strange land some might call it (cough cough). It was pretty weak, all told.
And Jack’s tattoos? One of them, the 5 on his forearm, has the incredibly deep meaning that he was once the star of Fox drama “Party of 5.”
Very definitely no, as the ep makes pretty clear. Jack was insanely paranoid and misread what was going on. It’s not that odd to have your father-in-laws cell #, especially when Jack is a mess and she’s worried about him. She was seeing the guy that we saw in the ep, not Christian, and Christian really was going to AA.
Okay, maybe I stand corrected. But then, it’s Ben so maybe I’m being lied to…
But Ben in the finale of Season 3 claims that he “not so long ago” made a decision that took the lives of over 40 people. That very strongly implies that he was responsible for the Purge (the “enhanced” text says so straight out, but it’s been known to be unreliable since it isn’t done by the writers). And yet we know that Widmore was the big boss at the time of the purge, though it’s possible that Ben made the call at a time when Widmore was off fathering Penny or something on the mainland.
Ben also claims to Locke that it wasn’t his decision, for what it’s worth.
Ben is a total mindfuck.
We don’t know when exactly Ben took over as leader. Based off Alex’s age, Widmore was banished shortly after the purge. Ben could have already been in charge for the purge, and then they banished widmore.
The fact that the Others were living in the barracks when Widmore left is more reliable than Alex’s age. 
But I suppose you’re right: Ben could have taken over for Widmore, ordered the purge, and had Widmore banished all pretty much at the same time.
I meant that since Alex was so young, it had to be shortly after the purge.
When Sawyer/Nikki/Paolo/Sayid are at the Pearl, they look at the one of the other monitors and some creepy dude with an eyepatch in a room full of computers looks into the camera for the Pearl and breaks it or something.
Was that ever explained?
(I also apparently missed a few episodes–I never saw that one before and I missed the Pacemaker/Bunny scam)
Also–it’s VERY, VERY clear that the Other’s “Good Person” thing is a value judgment on a person’s character not a “good candidate”. So why Sawyer, Kate & Jack? Con-man, murderess (and user*), Jack is a whiney, paranoid man-bitch.
What the HELL are their standards? If it was just Ben, I’d say “They grabbed Kate/Sawyer to pressure Jack for the operation” but everyone was talking about “good people”/“bad people”. Any “good people” list that doesn’t include Hurley, Rose, Bernard, maybe Claire, maybe Locke, certainly Desmond (if they knew about him) is totally flawed.
And there IS something to the “good person” thing: the smoke-monster attacked Mr. Eko after Eko told the Smoke-Ghost of his brother that he did NOT need forgiveness (aka was a bad person)
*Sawyer is a man-slut: he’ll sleep with anyone/thing with boobs. Kate is something worse: she’ll latch onto anyone IF she thinks she can use them. And it’s all about usefulness to her, and nothing more.
Like I just said in the “Has ‘Lost’ lost it” thread, this is at the top of my *Lost Stuff That Bugs Me *list.
But Smokey/dream-Yemi *already said *he forgave Eko. And Eko worked hard to build the church, save the Island, etc. etc. – is Smokey a Faith vs. Works hardass? Plus, Ben only asked for forgiveness for breaking the rules and/or letting Alex get killed. All his other crimes are OK with Smokey?
Maybe Smokey ≠ The Island? Maybe Smokey is a bad dog.
Oh, and WRT:
Yes, later in Season 3. How far are you now?