'Lost' recap: Sunk

Hurley summed this one up for me. Slumped on the sand at the end of ''The Candidate,'' the lovably unlucky lug hung his head and hid behind his veil of coiled locks and tried very hard not to break. But he couldn't, and the sound of his sobbing just got me. Behold the deadliest hour in Lost history.

Jin-Soo Kwon: Dead. Sun-Hwa Kwon: Dead. Sayid Jarrah: Dead. All three: Torpedoed by the Man In Black's submarine subterfuge. All three: Das Booted from the Lost saga. There can no longer be any doubt about this: The Locke-ness Monster is pure evil. Right? Fake Locke — the incarnation of the smoke monster; the manifestation of Jacob's cynical enemy, the Man In Black — has been lying to the castaways (and to us) all season. He never wanted to save the castaways. He never wanted to liberate Jacob's candidates from their perverted destiny. He never wanted to fly them to a world where everything they had lost would be regained. No: Smokey wanted them dead. He couldn't kill them to achieve his goal because those were the rules (although I'm still unclear what the rules truly are and why they even exist) so he put the castaways in a position where their own manic striving for escape would do the deadly job for him. And now three of our oldest, dearest Lost friends are gone. Our only consolation is that Fake Locke's plan actually didn't work. He wanted — needed — to wipe out all of Jacob's candidates. FAIL. Now that Jack and co. know Smokey's motivation and M.O., how can Fake Locke possibly finish his mission? As the Monster marched into the night, the scowl on his borrowed face may have been the look of a man-thing realizing that he hadn't won a battle — he had just lost the war. I have a theory about Fake Locke's next move — but that's for later.

I'm guessing my Smokey analysis provides only the coldest of comfort for you right now. You are sad, I'm sure. Are you angry, too? Maybe not about Sayid. His demise seemed inevitable following his post-Temple zombifiation. But Mr. Natural Born Killer got a chance to prove himself by hustling off with the bomb in hopes of diminishing its impact. In the end, Sayid's heart tilted the right way, to borrow some jargon from the late Dogen. The drowning of Jin and Sun were tougher pills to swallow. The long-separated lovers finally reunited in the previous episode. Now: Ciao! Brutal. They died holding each other, but we weren't shown that image. Instead, we were given a shot of their joined hands unclasping, and I found it ice-cold that the final visual of Jin and Sun should emphasize separation, not unity. Add the Kwons to the list of Lost deaths marked by pitiless poignancy. Does that piss you off? And how do you feel about Jin's choice to die with his wife, thus making Ji-Yeon an orphan? I think Jin made the correct call — but that's for later, too.

NEXT: Smokey's five-step murder plan