I'm writing this recap directly after writing the one for "The Brig," which turned out to be comparable in length to War and Peace. So I'm going to try to make this slightly more brief by avoiding flowery prose and actually getting to the point for once.

The plot:

Finally, we get Ben Linus's flashbacks. While the previous episode felt like some ancient Southern Gothic revenge fable, this time we get the Saga of the '70s Hippies (with a little Supernatural Horror Movie thrown in there). Ben, who it turns out was not born on the island, went along with his alcoholic, in-need-of-work father. There, they joined the Dharma Initiative, and he met a cute girl, had visions of his dead mother, went to school, met a mysterious, possibly age-less Hostile, killed his father, double-crossed his people, and so on. You know. The usual stuff. There were no gigantic reveals, but the entire thing was pretty much an overload of important information.

Back in the present time, Locke and Ben go on a journey to meet the mysterious Jacob, aka Him, the big kahuna, the man who will answer every question we have. The motivation Ben had in simply doing whatever Locke said wasn't completely apparent until the end, but it worked. The other Others, fed up with Ben's leadership, seemed to welcome Locke into the crew, even as a potential leader - a point which was strengthened by the fact that Ben started out as an outsider, too.

The heart of the episode, of course, was the big reveal of Jacob, who turned out to be...an invisible man. Well, not quite invisible - I had to re-watch the scene once or twice, but when Jacob goes haywire after Locke shines the flashlight, he pushes Ben into a wall, the camera shakily pans back to the chair - and there's a man sitting there. We only see his silhouette, and in the interest of spoiling as little as possible, I'm not putting the screencap up here for everyone to examine. He did seem to look familiar, but I could be wrong.

However, disregarding his identity for a moment, the important thing was that Locke heard him. Locke was being uncommonly level-headed this episode, conscious of Ben's faltering popularity and assuming that Ben simply made up Jacob out of thin air. But then those two words: "help me." And when Ben found out Locke heard them, in an act of self-preservation, Ben shot him. Because if Locke has the power to hear Jacob, then what power does Ben have over the Others? Of course, it's probably important to point out that Ben didn't kill Locke - considering his connection with the island, combined with its mysterious healing properties, I wouldn't count the man of faith out just yet.

The subplot:

Although it felt maybe just a beat too rushed, there were plenty of developments back on the beach that firmly set the story up for the season finale. Sawyer returned to camp with the Locke-supplied tape proving Juliet was a mole and immediately sought out Sayid. Nice move - Sayid is the guy you can always count on to be strong and level-headed (i.e., I really hope he doesn't get killed off any time soon). However, as soon as everyone heard the tape, there was another twist - on Side B, Ben's full plan was revealed. (Nice how it was perfectly queued up.) The Others are coming - for real this time - to steal Sun and any other pregnant women, and Jack has been sitting on this info for a while because he "wasn't sure what to do about it." It's time for our castaways to form a plan, pronto - could we be looking at an all-out battle on our hands soon?

Ruminations & Theories:

-You remember the scene: Ben walks into the old creepy house, followed by Locke. Ben started talking to "Jacob" in the chair. Locke thinks he's crazy. And as I was watching, I suddenly thought I had it all figured out: JACOB IS THE BUNNY! BEN IS INSANE AND TAKING ORDERS FROM HIS PET BUNNY! The way the scene was framed, you couldn't see the seat of the chair, and I was fully expecting Ben's rabbit, clearly very dear to him in his flashbacks, to then be revealed to be sitting there. How cool would that have been? Alas, it was not to be.

-Here's a legitimate theory: Jin's true father is none other than Dr. Marvin Candle, spokesman on all of the Dharma Initiative's orientation videos. Why? A better question: why not? In Sun's last flashback, it was clearly established that there was a high possibility that the fisherman who raised Jin was not his real father. Why would they set that up if they weren't going to follow through? Knowing how the writers of Lost like to turn any coincidence into a secret character relationship, why not make the only Korean-looking Dharma dude the father of the only Korean guy currently on the island?

-Wow. So "Roger Workman," seen in Hurley's last episode, was actually Ben's dad. Nice little mini-mystery tie-in, solved. But man, that scene in which Ben killed him was disturbing. Any sympathy for him sort of flew out the window (although what the heck happened to that cute little girl?)

-In this episode we were told what's been hinted at before: the Dharma Initiative was just a group of hippies who wanted to save the world and do experiments, and the Others - the Hostiles - were present on the island long before them. That wraps up the Dharma mystery but leaves the origins of the Others wide open. But then again, on closer inspection, it would be dismissive to just call the Dharma folks idealist hippies, because they really were doing some heavy-duty stuff (case in point: the power of the late, great Swan hatch).

-In the same vein, did anyone else find it suspicious that in the flashback scene in which the schoolteacher went off to fight the Hostiles, you didn't actually see any fighting? Despite all the dead bodies at the end of the episode, couldn't it be possible that the Dharma Initiative was painstakingly creating some kind of theatrical myth about a group of "hostiles," a myth which later got out of hand when said hostiles actually appeared? Somebody could make a pretty elaborate theory out of that.

-You know how Richard (the dude who always looks like he's wearing too much eyeshadow) appeared in Ben's flashback looking, well, not much younger? I mean, yeah, its hard to age actors appropriately for scenes like that, but considering Ben looks, at the most generous estimate, about 40, that would mean Richard would have to be at least 50. I submit to you this theory: the true Others never age. They've been there possibly forever. That's how they're able to move so swiftly and silently through the woods and as a side power they're also able to whisper to each other really ominously so it echoes through the jungle. (Nice return of the jungle-whispering, by the way. I was afraid they'd forgotten about it.)

Well, it looks like this commentary turned out to be just about as long as the last one. Whoops. So what do you guys think? Locke: dead or alive? Jacob: cheesy or way-cool? Milkshakes: chocolate or vanilla? I know this: only one more episode to go, and then after that we get the two-hour season finale...