Welcome to this week’s Lost meditation. Not a lot to say for such a tight episode — it answered more questions than it raised and, frankly, was just a well-woven trio of little stories: that of Jack the Believer, Ben the Killer, and Dr. Linus the Good Man. I’m eager to hear what you have to say, though. Did you like this episode as much as I did?

As always, be sure to check out the Lostpedia entry for this week’s episode, too.

Spoilers are what killed her friends, back at the Statue.

• I think this is the first episode of the season that doesn’t begin in the X Timeline.

• “So tell me, Miles. How did he die?” Ben tries to lie his way out of Ilana’s wrath, because, you know, he’s Ben. But when she doesn’t buy it, we see Miles playing the part of the chorus. “Uh oh!” he says.

• “Yeah, a fire will fix everything.” It’s been, what, three years since the castaways left the Island? I’m surprised anything of their camp is still really standing. I’m not sure I’d drink a three-year-old bottle of water, either. But I’d never survive on a deserted island, anyway.

• “I’m trying to keep you healthy.” Notice how Ben has gone from gassing his father with cyanide to giving him life-saving oxygen. That’s a great reflection on the primary timeline. Then we get something of a bombshell from Ben’s dad, who let’s us know that he and Ben somehow left the Island… before it sank, I guess? This is our first encounter with the legacy of the Island itself in the X Timeline, and I’m not sure how to read into it. Did the Island’s explosion alter time in two directions?

• “Try me.” “Not yet.” Nestor Carbonell is a fucking wonderful actor. Look at how he plays lines that would otherwise be obvious. He handles the old cut-off-in-mid-sentence problem terrifically, and he does great things with lines like “Not yet.” He needs to load that line in such a way that we believe he’s got a good reason, and isn’t just holding back to hold back the way characters sometimes do. It’s not that Richard is badly written, but Carbonell has a lot to convey to make his swings from mysterioso to desperation ring true — and he does it. Great stuff.

• “I remember that plane breaking in half like it was yesterday.” The book that Ben doesn’t pick up, that lays right there on the ground in front of him when he picks up that bottle of water, is Chaim Potok’s The Chosen.

• “Why would I need your money when there’s a couple of jabronies under there named Nikki and Paolo who got buried alive with $8 million in diamonds on top of them?” I’ve nothing to add. I just love this show, sometimes.

• “I’ve got something I need to do.” Man, Lost has gotten a lot of mileage out of the dynamite in the Black Rock. Think about it: by blowing up Arzt the way they did back in Season 1, the writers imbued the Black Rock, the dynamite, and Arzt with a lot of juice. Would we even care about Arzt enough to see him so much this season if he hadn’t gone out so effectively back then? Five years later, I’m still cringing when people go meddling with the dynamite in the Black Rock. And meddle they do…

• “Dude, you’re gonna blow up!” So two dudes sit down to chat over a stick of lit dynamite. That’s just good drama. Meanwhile, what we see here is Jack’s transition fully into a Man of Faith, a man who believes in the mysticism that surrounds Jacob and also believes in his own power — something which Jack hasn’t managed to do simultaneously before now, I don’t think.

• The touch of Jacob is a gift that bestows immortality. Does this mean Jacob touched Michael, back in Season 4, and that’s why Michael couldn’t die? Probably. But what does this mean about the appearance of Christian Shephard on the freighter back when Michael finally did die? Was that an appearance by the Man in Black? Did the Man in Black touch Michael and bestow on him a similar gift? Or was Michael a rope being pulled by the both of them? And just how far does the Man In Black’s power reach — out to the freighter, for sure, but probably not so far as Jacob’s. That’s why he’s so eager to leave the Island now.

• Alex Rousseau lives in LA. Which seems to mean that her mother does, too. So… everyone lives in LA. I wonder if we’ll be told that there’s something more than coincidence to all this. I almost hope not. Better that we’re left to discuss it.

• My wife says she would watch the show in which Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn are public-school teachers in LA, just to spend an hour with those actors every week. I think I would, too.

• In the X Timeline, we see that Ben has the capacity for goodness. He is a case for nurture over nature. Yet the Ben that has done so many bad things has been given a chance to do more good, despite his past deeds. Stripped of his power — more so than he was when he was a captive of the castaways — he finds Team Jacob accepting of him, to a point. But while he has a side to side with… he is alone.

• Notice, in the final shots of Team Jacob on the beach, that Richard and Ben are still apart, on opposite sides of the group. Are these teams fixed in place now, or will we see side-switching still happen? I know my wife hopes Sawyer will leave the Smoke Monster’s team, and Jin, it seems, needs rescuing… but I’m sure Lost still has tricks left to deploy. But with Widmore’s arrival, and the teams all but in place, I’ll bet the final match of this game can begin.