The Incident

Tonight's episode of Lost ended the season with a bang. Pun most certainly intended, but really, this was a fine bit of writing to cap things off.

The series of flashbacks dealing with Jacob were a really nice, character-based texture to the show. Most of them didn't provide us with new information, but were still great moments to see, that synched up with many great details we've seen in the past.

Revisiting the letter written by "our Sawyer" to the "Con Man Sawyer" nicely evoked a personal character's pain from earlier seasons.

Seeing Jack actually live a moment in which his father gave him the "count to five" advice he'd later pass on to Kate had great resonance. It was particularly interesting in that, at the time, Jack actually resented his father for doing so.

We haven't seen Sun and Jin together on screen once all season, so their flashback, even while providing no new information, was sweet -- a reminder of when they were happy together.

And then there were new bits of information too. We saw Hurley pushed to board the Ajira flight not by a ghostly Charlie, but by Jacob. And we saw the moment in which Nadia was killed -- it would seem not orchestrated by Ben after all. Both cool things to tweak what our assumptions might have been. (Well, mine anyway.)

The great character beats weren't just restricted to the flashbacks, either. Checking in on Bernard and Rose, happily living out their "retirement," Robinson Crusoe style (with Vincent!), was a touching scene. It was also great to see Sawyer finally unload on Jack for ruining the good thing he had going. Meanwhile, in the present, we were treated to "vulnerable Ben," a texture of that character we so rarely get to see.

But for me, perhaps the single greatest triumph in the writing tonight was having Miles actually voice the theory I'd become absolutely convinced was the truth -- that setting off the warhead was in fact the very "incident" that required the building of the Swan in the first place, a "predestination paradox."

Now that he's said it, it's really shaken my certainty. I would have waited rather patiently for 2010, expecting that I knew how this season's big cliffhanger would be resolved. But now that both the "this will undo everything" and the "this will cause the very thing you're trying to avoid" theories have been placed on the table by the characters themselves? Well, now I expect it's not likely to be either of those things. Not entirely, anyway. In any case, I'm a lot less sure about what is going to happen next.

While we're all spending the next long months stewing over that, we can ask ourselves plenty of other questions too. Are Sayid or Juliet gonna make it? Are we to take it that "Locke" is actually an incarnation of the man from the teaser? And given Ben and Richard's emphatic statements that no one comes back from the dead, what are we to make of Jack's father, Christian? Was he also an incarnation of this new stranger, working a Rube Goldberg-like plot to put Locke in a position to, well, become "possessed?" Does any of this Benjamin Linus vs. Charles Widmore even really matter anymore, or is the real struggle at the core of Lost that between Jacob and this character we've only now just met?

We've got some time now to talk amongst ourselves.