'Lost' Recap: Taking Charge

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Then Sun scampered up to him and delivered one of the cheesiest acting moments Yunjin Kim has ever committed to film: ''This man, Jacob? Can he tell us how to bring Jin and the rest of our people back here?'' Locke: ''Absolutely!'' It felt so forced I thought she and Locke had staged it for effect. When Locke finished, more cornball followed as he passed through the Others ranks, earning hammy head nods and cheesy back slaps from his admiring flock.

Maybe not the greatest scene Lost has ever staged, but at least it had a pretty killer kicker:

RICHARD: I'm starting to think John Locke is going to be trouble.
BEN: Why do you think I tried to kill him?

Watching Ben and Richard watch Locke's rise to power, I found myself recalling Season 3, when Ben offered Locke leadership of the Others, provided he could pass the rite of initiation: killing his father. At the time, Richard was all for the idea — he had grown wary of Ben's leadership due to his fixation with curing the Others' procreation problem — and when Locke refused to slay his pop, Richard helped him along by planting the idea of making Sawyer do the deed for him. Why was it so important to Richard that Locke kill his bad dad? The answer, it seemed, was that Locke needed to fully exorcise the demons of his past — most of which were bound up in his father — before he could become the Island's newest Pope.

Since Season 3, Locke has seen and experienced much, to the point where he seemed to be at peace with himself. In ''The Little Prince,'' he told Sawyer he had no interest in changing the past because ''I needed that pain to get to where I am now.'' And initially, it seemed that this strange new Resurrected Locke represented the completion of Locke's redemption project. But now, we must wonder. In the final moments of ''Follow The Leader,'' Locke not only confessed his Kill Jacob ambition, he admitted to Ben that he had lied to Sun; he has no interest in reuniting with the castaways or even saving them. Presuming he was being genuine with Ben and not running a mindgame on him, who is this new Locke really? Is he his own man? Are the same old issues that have always roiled his soul — the fury of being duped by fathers and cheated by fate — still fueling him? Or is he just a vessel controlled by other powers, some kind of Trojan horse created to infiltrate the ranks of the Others and assassinate their leader. But on behalf of whom? We are reminded again that there are ''teams'' and ''sides'' being drawn on the Island — and that wayyyy back in Season 2, Ben insisted to Michael that his Others ''were the good guys.'' So which side is Locke on: the side of angels or the side of demons? The side that will win — or the side that will lose?

What have I overlooked? A lot. I didn't talk about Pierre Chang and Miles. I didn't talk about the evacuation of the Island. I didn't talk about the LOL funny history quiz administered to Hurley. I didn't talk about why Dharma wants to drill into the electromagnetic anomaly at the Swan site. I didn't discuss further the oddly quiet year for Sun and what it might have to do with the time travel novel entitled The Year of The Quiet Sun. And I didn't discuss Alpert's claim that he watched all the time traveling castaways die right before his eyes back in 1977 — a claim that I suspect is either totally bogus or doesn't really tell the whole truth. But please, feel free to discuss these things for me in the boards below — and come back next Wednesday for very special year-end editions of Doc Jensen and ''Totally Lost.''