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Which brings us to the return of Tom, a.k.a. Mr. Friendly. Actually, it was neat to see the resurrection of several departed characters: Naomi, George Minkowski, Mrs. Klugh (in the ''previously on'' recap), and especially Libby — but I'll get to her in a bit, because I really want to talk about good old Grizzly first. Was I the only one who hooted with glee when Michael walked in on Tom entertaining a handsome gentleman named Arturo? ''I don't make it to the mainland too often,'' Tom said with a puckish glint, ''so when I do, I like to indulge myself.'' Hoot! See, even before Tom cryptically told Kate back in season 3 that she wasn't his type, I'd been irked to no end that this cast — as diverse as any that's ever been on television — didn't have a single gay character, so this moment was especially satisfying for me. (Doc Jensen stand-in extracurricular reference No. 2: Friendly's lodging, the Hotel Earle — which is now called the Washington Square Hotel — famously housed Bob Dylan, as well as the authors of ''The Ballad of Ira Hayes,'' a folk song about the Native American soldier captured in the iconic photo of the raising of the American flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. At the end of his life, Hayes drank heavily, reportedly wracked with survivor guilt; he died, as the song goes, in ''two inches of water in a lonely ditch.'' A nod to Michael's desolation in that alleyway, perhaps?)

But Tom didn't show up just to complete Lost's Benetton dance card. He also reinforced three major elements of the show's mythos: He told Michael (1) that some of the Others can leave the Island whenever they want, (2) that the Island won't let Michael kill himself, and (3) that Charles Widmore faked the Oceanic 815 crash by buying an old Boeing 777, filling it with bodies dug up from a Thai cemetery, and sinking it in an ocean trench.

Now, the first one I believe, though I do think the timing of Friendly's appearance in Manhattan against his death on the Island at most only two weeks later is a bit...fuzzy. And as for the other two, well, I dunno. It seemed to me that the Island did make itself known at least through the reappearance of Libby; for a moment there in the hospital, Michael seemed to be channeling some earlier patient of Libby's, and I don't think it was just Michael's mind dancing a guilt-ridden tarantella with his subconscious. But I'm going to let Doc Jensen dive deeper into the omniscient, sentient, anti-suicide Island issue, because, well, I'm already running long here, and the more I think about it — would the Island have stopped Friendly from shooting Michael too? was Michael's consciousness also hopping through time, or was Libby's cameo more on the order of a dead Charlie showing up to slap some sense into Hurley? — the more confused I get. (Doc Jensen stand-in extracurricular reference No. 3: Right after Michael's gun jammed, we heard someone on the TV game show playing in his room say ''Kurt Vonnegut,'' most likely a nod to the Lostian author's essays about attempting suicide.)

The more I think about Charles Widmore as a merciless Lex Luthorian villain, meanwhile, the less I'm convinced. First of all, a quick DVR pause on that invoice for the ''old'' 777 plane — a model that was only ten years old in 2004 — reveals Widmore purchased it for $450,000. Which is a bargain considering Boeing's website quotes the cheapest new 777 at $200 million. That's not to say that Widmore definitively isn't behind the fake Oceanic 815 wreckage. Just that Friendly's ''proof'' smelled bogus to me. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if we don't have an Emperor Palpatine situation going on here, i.e., a mastermind playing both sides of a faux war against each other so he can ascend to power.

And that mastermind could only be Ben. As Miles — who evidently escaped Locke's grenade-in-the-mouth gambit unscathed — said to his captors last night, ''[Ben] wants to survive. And considering a week ago you had a gun to his head and now he's eating pound cake, I'd say he's a guy who gets what he wants.'' Indeed, only Ben could connive to send Michael onto the freighter and make him think he's a suicide bomber, and then make the bomb's mechanism pop up a flag that read ''NOT YET.'' (Note that ''yet'': Those explosives looked quite real, and one of the rules of storytelling is bombs are meant to go boom.) (Doc Jensen stand-in extracurricular challenge No. 1: The code for the bomb was 71776, i.e., July 1776, i.e., the month our fair country was born. What does it mean? I'll leave that to you; my guess would be that it's just so it'd be easy for Michael to remember, but this is Lost we're talking about here.) Only Ben could argue that he doesn't kill innocent people in war and somehow make you believe it. Only Ben could devastate Michael by coolly pointing out that the Others never asked him to kill Ana Lucia and Libby; he did that all by himself. And only Ben could have the chutzpah to follow that up by telling Michael he's now one of ''the good guys.''

I especially liked how, when Michael broke down sobbing after Ben spoke those chilling words, we finally cut from the flashback into a close-up of Sayid, the last man to lose it in the face of his collusion with the talented Mr. Linus. Of course, that's in the future; the Sayid of the present believes working with Ben is tantamount to selling your soul, and so he had no compunction about selling out Michael to Captain Gault. It was a solid cliff-hanger-y moment, but it left me wondering about two things: One, we've heard precious little from Desmond since ''The Constant''; all he seems to do is follow Sayid around and look perplexed. And two, as my other Lost-obsessed colleague Dan Snierson first suggested to me, I think the captain already knows Kevin Johnson is really Michael Dawson. Forget Miles' psychic intuition that Kevin wasn't really Kevin. If Charles Widmore is really as ruthlessly capable as we've been told, don't you think he would've vetted Kevin Johnson as thoroughly as he did Miles, Lapidus, Faraday, and Charlotte? (Doc Jensen stand-in extracurricular challenge No. 2: Other than the famous NBA player, do y'all think there's any significance to the name Kevin Johnson, or that Kevin's birthday was July 8, 1963? Google and Wikipedia are shooting blanks, and the best I can come up with is that Kevin Johnson was also my high school assistant principal, who chaperoned a three-week trip I took to Moscow and saved my life by pulling me out of oncoming traffic outside Red Square. So there's that. Otherwise, I'm inclined to think it's a name that's just average enough not to get noticed without raising any flags that it's a fake.)

NEXT: Chronicle of a death foresold


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