'Lost' recap: The Will And The Way... To The End

The Candidates are ready to run.

On The Island, destiny-seeking Jack Shephard accepted Jacob's nomination as his replacement as Island protector. Nearly 2,500 years after reluctantly accepting responsibility of Island stewardship from his mad, manipulative Mother, Jacob blessed some river water and offered a cup to Jack — Holy Communion, Island style. The good doctor freely and willingly took and drank the mystic elixir, and his eyes popped from psychic revelation. In that moment, I imagined that Jack's brain was flooded with epiphanies. Now I know how to kill Fake Locke! Now I know where the Dharma palette drop came from! Now I know why I'm such a douche! If only we could inaugurate our presidents with this ritual, because clearly that Bible-swearing thing does no good.

In the Sideways world, we got another candidate ready to run — and I'm not talking Jack and his gut full of family-sized Super-Bran. No, I'm referring to John Locke, who had an epiphany by proxy. After learning that his colleague Dr. Linus has been beaten to a near pulp (and near Island Enlightenment) by the same suave Scottish bruthuh who ran him down, Locke decided that the pile-up of post-Oceanic 815 coincidences and synchronicities were too meaningful to ignore. Biting back on his own incredulity and skepticism, the born-again science teacher wheeled himself into Jack Shephard's office and announced he wanted the surgery that the good doctor offered him two episodes ago in ''The Candidate.'' ''I'm ready to get out of this wheelchair,'' he said. It was less about wanting to walk and more about wanting to meet the meaning behind this divine conspiracy. But more than anything, it was a choice. Like Island Jack, Sideways Locke seized the opportunity life had given him: the chance to decide who and what he wanted to be.

When I first saw this episode last week in the company of 2000 Lost fans at ''Lost Live'' in Los Angeles, a good portion of the crowd cheered at this moment. I don't know what that moment meant for them, but I know what it signified for me: The return of the original John Locke is nigh. I suppose we should sweat the prospect that Fake Locke's consciousness could come streaming into Sideways Locke's body should Jack's surgery trigger Island Enlightenment. But this is why this is a two-man — and two-Jack — operation. In the Sideways world, Jack will fix Locke's spine and facilitate Locke's awakening. On The Island, Guardian Jack will defeat Fake Locke and protect the spiritual circuit between the ''real Lockes'' of both worlds. It's sweet happily ever after... but I worry about the implications of what we saw in the opening moments of the season some 15 weeks or so ago, an ominous image that has been left for the last episode of Lost to explain: The Island, dead and underwater.

NEXT: A callback to the pilot