Lost Review:
"Jughead" (Episode 5.03)

This week's Lost was less a series of wild cards than the whirlwind season premier. Having established that the survivors on the island have come loose from time, and are spinning back and forth between decades, "Jughead" zoomed into the former lives of physicist Daniel Faraday, and the notorious Mr. Widmore.

The show opened with a welcome bit of self-referencing humor. Desmond and his family (he has a son!) are sailing towards land, and Desmond tells the kid, "There's an island, a beautiful island. I left there a long time ago. It's called Great Britain."

Desmond, with his newly-enhanced memory, is on his way to find Faraday's family. Meanwhile, on the island, Locke, Juliette and Co. have landed among the Latin-quoting, H-bomb-fearing Others of the '50s, with whom is a young Mr. Widmore. And a massive hydrogen bomb called "Jughead."  Whoa.

So apparently (spoiler alert!), as Desmond finds out, Mr. Widmore was Faraday's benefactor when he studied time-travel (AKA: physics) at Oxford. But Daniel's experiments addled the brain of a young woman, now in a coma, whom he deserted when he fled to the island, and whom Charles Widmore is now supporting financially. One of the rifle-toting Others on the island looks an awful lot like the woman in the coma. Faraday marvels, "You just look so much like someone I used to know," but the logistics of this connection are tricky. They have different names, Theresa and Ellie, and are separated by 50 years. Of course, certain eye-liner-wearing others don't age at all, so who knows.

A few other connections are possible. Theresa's sister looks an awful lot like the woman in the butcher shop at the end of "The Lie" eager to store Locke's body. And speculation has been floating around the web as to the identity of Faraday's mother. Could it be Ms. Hawking?

As we left poor Charlotte bleeding to (possible?) death, I couldn't help feeling satisfied that questions and answers are running closer together now, no more of this six-questions-for-one -answer deal. It makes the show much more watchable. Also, am I the only one who is relieved to be firmly grounded in sci-fi and out of the fantasy woods for a bit? We've (supposedly) been there for a while, but I get a strange sense of security from H-bombs, barricaded Oxford classrooms and Latin...less than I get from smoke monsters and visions of the dead.

But surely religion and fantasy (it's all part of quantum physics, right?) will creep back in there soon. After all, what good is Lost if it doesn't completely skewer our expectations?