TV Watch: Lost, Dead Is Dead

This season continues to impress. This episode showed us a great glimpse into Ben's life, the island and general and was actually pretty even handed in explaining things while creating some mystery - and not even in a "oh, behind that door is another mystery" kind of way.

While seeing the inside of the temple, the smoke monster up close and personal and enough symbols and glyphs to keep the Internet crowd pixelated for some time - the episode was actually a pretty good story all by itself. Ben has never actually been a favorite of mine, even though I think he's well acted and gets a decent chunk of good dialogue. There's just something convenient about his evil. Is he lying? Well, probably if it helps the plot somewhere down the road.

But this duplicity, and that Ben himself is a conflicted character with his own petty emotions, worked well for this one. Honestly, I had no idea whether he would get smoked (har har) by the end, but that it worked out that he seems terrified about following Locke is just perfect.

It will be interesting to see what this does to his character in the long run. What will Ben be if he can't be quietly scheming? Or will he just start pulling pranks to keep himself occupied?

As far as the mystery of the island goes, not sure what to say. The island as character got a few more points, and that it seems pretty all powerful. It's interesting that Christian Shepherd might not be a smoke-person, but a revived corpse. Anyone wanting to figure out a scientific explanation of old Smokey should have given up a long time ago, but that it lives under some kind of altar pretty much kills the notion.

I think the most interesting part was watching Ilana go all weird. It seems to echo what happened to CFL pretty closely. If the next episode gives us some goods on the whispers (thankfully they seem to have not forgotten them) and the statue, this season might just continue on its roll.