'Lost' recap: The End Begins Now

''NOT PENNY'S BOAT.'' They might be the most chilling words in all of Lost lore. (Runner-up: ''We're going to have to take the boy.'' — Mr. Friendly, season 1.) When we first saw them penned in black marker on the palm of Charlie Pace's hand in the finale of season 3, they expressed a heartbreaking discovery. Desmond Hume's vision of escape, reunion with loved ones, and happily ever after for all the castaways was a lie at worst, plain wrong at best. Last night, a different Desmond plunged into the oceanic depths and read a different Charlie's palm. He saw nothing at first — and then he saw everything. In a flash, Sideways Desmond Hume forged a link with his Island world doppelganger and downloaded his memory of ''NOT PENNY'S BOAT.'' Yet what was a dispiriting moment for Island Desmond was full of spirit for Sideways Desmond. For him, ''NOT PENNY'S BOAT'' was a call to hope; a call to faith; a call to something more hopeful than the lonely island of himself. In the gloomy shadows of a watery underworld, the Scotsman with the famous philosopher's name found enlightenment.

And so did we. ''Happily Ever After'' was the episode we've been waiting for all season. At last! Contact! (As in: the Carl Sagan novel and Robert Zemeckis film adaptation.) Finally! Connection between the Island world and the Sideways world — a close encounter of the Sliding Doors kind. The moment came in ingeniously unexpected form — an ironic reprise of Charlie's unforgettable sacrificial death inside the Looking Glass. The scene was simultaneously unsettling and exhilarating, and next to Jacob's allegory of the wine bottle, it stands as the most significant moment of season 6 so far. For Sideways skeptics, I'm guessing the episode either won you over or scared you away for good. Let me more provocative: If you've been a Sideways hater, and you remain one after last night's episode, you may as well call it a wrap on your Lost interest and skip ahead to the rest of your post-Lost life.

For the rest of us, I'm guessing ''Happily Ever After'' moves into the arena where Best Ever Episodes are debated. It was a revelatory episode about the theme of revelation. It was an episode that played like an allegory for spiritual conversion, yet contained a subversive critique of religious experience. (Not that those points need to be mutually exclusive.) I thrilled to see old friends again, including Daniel Fara — err, I mean, Daniel Widmore, Eloise Hawking (sporting a poofy cloud of parachute-ball hair and a new symbolically loaded brooch), Charlie Pace, and the woman we knew once as Penelope Widmore, though I believe I heard her Sideways iteration identified as Penelope Milton. (As in Paradise Lost author-poet John Milton?) ''Happily Ever After'' was an episode that will force us to reconsider much of what we've seen in the Sideways world to date while also directing our attention to the end game of the show, which appears to be some kind of psychic exodus out of Island captivity into the quasi-Canaan of Sidewaysabad. Which souls will make the transmigration? Can some decline the opportunity? Indeed, the most intriguing possibility to come out of ''Happily Ever After'' — just a smidge more intriguing that the possibility that Charles Widmore could actually be a good guy — is that the castaways might actually have a choice between happily ever afters. Wow. See, Juliet? Free will does exist on The Island, after all!

NEXT: Timing is everything, unless you're on Team Widmore