'Lost' recap: Well, Well, Well

Chaos reigns. That's the tagline from the controversial film Anti-Christ, the feel-bad love story of the decade, and it can just as easily be applied to last night's Lost, which left me feeling disturbed despite being a charming feel-good love story about Sideways Hurley's $100,000 date with Libby, the loony bin Pretty Woman. Taking its cue from those ''highly unstable'' sticks of Black Rock dynamite, ''Everybody Loves Hugo'' was another sweet-and-funny installment in the larger Hurley subgenre, but punctuated with momentous WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!? shocks, twists, and narrative anarchy. Ilana blew up. The Black Rock got obliterated. SatanaLocke threw Island Desmond down a well while Sideways Desmond ran down Fake Locke with his car, leaving everyone's favorite clone world substitute teacher a bloody, convulsing bag of bones. Immediately after watching the episode, my colleague Adam B. Vary stumbled into my office, rattled by Sideway Desmond's apparent demonic turn and even more rolled by Sideways Locke's life-threatening peril. I share his shakes. Sideways Locke! Our last remaining vestige of the late and equally fate-screwed John Locke! Why does cosmos hate this man? What remains of our beloved man of faith? Sleeping Beauty Hurley may have gotten a magical kiss of awakening from Princess Charming Libby... but all we got was Kiss' ''All Hell's Breaking Loose.''

Of course, almost every single statement in that preceding paragraph is open for debate and re-interpretation, and I shall do my level best to mull all the provocative possibilities as we move through the recap. But let's hit up high that amid the ambiguity, we got an answer to one of Lost's major mythological questions. What are The Whispers? They are the souls of The Island dead that have not been allowed to move on because of their actions on The Island. No big surprise, but satisfying, nonetheless. Hurley puzzled most of that together himself. Confirmation and elaboration came courtesy of Michael, a member of the phantom chorus. But was Michael an Obi-Wan guardian angel or a Darth Sidious misleading menace? And didn't it almost sound as if Lost was putting Purgatory theory back on the table after so many years of denying it? I can't deny that it did, but I'm not believing, despite all those conspicuous references to a ''God forsaken'' this and a ''God help us'' that.

Complicating matters was the book that Hurley found while rummaging through Ilana's stuff: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground. This isn't the first time this season Lost has cited a seminal text in the canon of existential lit. In ''LA X,'' Lost cited Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, a writer whose fingerprints seem to be all over the season. For example, have you noticed the conspicuously repetitive practice of presenting characters would either/or choices? Kierkegaard's oeuvre includes a work called Either/Or. (And Repetition, too. And before I get the e-mails: Yes, maybe The Sickness Unto Death has something to do with The Sickness, as well.) But I think last week signaled an even deeper dive into existential thought with that rabbit named Angstrom. ''Angst:'' a word that comes to us from Kierkegaard. ''Angstrom:'' a unit of measurement in electromagnetic radiation and other natural sciences. It's almost as if Lost is now declaring existentialism as the philosophy that fuels its intellectual engine, especially here in the mirror-fixated season 6; a key tenet of existentialism, be it the Christian brand endorsed by Kierkegaard or the godless kind represented by Jean Paul Sartre, is the idea that reflection creates identity. Perhaps The Island isn't a magical place that traps souls or spirits. Maybe its unique physical properties allow it snare energy patterns of consciousness. Heck, maybe ''trapping'' and ''snaring'' are the wrong verbs. Maybe The Island unlocks, cultivates, or even makes consciousness.

NEXT: Existentialism recommends packing wisely