'Lost': A Moving Ending

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THE FREIGHTER FOLK PUNT

As the last of the beach castaways were ferried to the freighter, we got some cryptic moments with the season's much heralded new arrivals, the freighter folk — scenes clearly meant to set up arcs for next season. Psychic hustler Miles Straume announced he was staying on the Island — all the better to give Lost someone who can make sense of the show's mounting infestation of poltergeists. Miles also confronted Charlotte on her big secret: that she's been to the Island before, and was perhaps even born there. (I let out a whoop when I heard that bit of business, as this has been my Charlotte theory all season long, dating back to my recap of the second episode.) When Charlotte played dumb and asked Miles what he meant, the quippy ghost whisperer responded with perhaps one of the best line readings in Lost history: ''Yes...what do I mean?'' We'll talk about Lapidus and Faraday in a minute, but allow me say, one final time, that the freighter-folk story line got screwed by the strike, but I'm glad that the show gave us reason to believe that these promising characters will get their respective due next year.

MOVING THE ISLAND: ''EXOTIC MATTER,'' INDEED

We come now to what will probably be the most debated parts in the finale, as it involved sci-fi stuff that I know scares a chunk of the viewing audience. Deep below the dilapidated greenhouse (how deep? ''Deep,'' Ben said) lies the laboratory level of the Orchid, a Dharma station devoted to time travel. This whole sequence was dotted with great humor the Ben-Locke bit about not knowing what anthuriums look like; Ben sitting Locke down in front of the TV to watch the orientation video while he loaded metallic objects into the Vault — all the better to ease us gently into the weirdness to come.

The newest orientation film included a laundry list of sci-fi buzz terms: Casimir effect, space and time, electromagnetic energy, negatively charged exotic matter. All of these are necessary ingredients for wormhole theory. Or in the quippy-smooth words of Ben, it means ''time-traveling bunnies.'' The most baffling part of the orientation-video experience was how it stopped and rewound before the narrator, Edgar Halliwax, could demonstrate how the machine was used. But this is a staple element of all the Dharma videos: the possibility of mind-game tomfoolery, which invites the viewer to question the legitimacy of the narrative.

Before Ben and Locke could get down to moving the Island, an interruption. A not-dead-yet Keamy crashed the party and tried to flush Ben out by bragging about his bomb and mercilessly taunting him about his daughter ''bleeding out.'' Ben cracked, allowing emotions to get in the way of ''command decisions'' (or so he claimed; you never know with this guy), and beat and stabbed Keamy. The merc died soon after, activating his heart-monitor detonator. Locke castigated Ben for dooming the freighter, which may have been his intention all along. ''So?'' Ben said. (My wife wanted to know why, when Keamy passed, Locke didn't just quickly transfer the heart monitor to his own arm.)

NEXT: Ben's exit strategy