First, you should read J. Wood on last week’s double episode.

For four seasons we’ve watched the narrative jump from the island time to flashbacks and flashforwards, and we’ve had to piece together events in order to make sense of the storyline and locate ourselves in relation to that storyline. This is just what the island characters are forced to do now; piece together out-of-order events to make sense of them, and locate themselves in relation to those events. In this way, the experiences of the watchers and the watched converge through the narrative.”

Yeah, and then some. The whole time travel thing is messing with my mind. Computer Guru Son said something that helped: each character is on his on timeline/road, and when those timelines intersect may be one time for one character and another for someone else. For instance, Locke meets WIdmore in 2007 (?three years after the crash) when Locke is time-travelling back to the past. But Widmore should remember, in 2007, meeting Locke and Faraday and Sawyer and Juliette on the island when WIdmore was just a youth. (I still don’t understand why Desmond forgets, until his nightmare, that he already met Faraday.) Locke remembers all the times he has met Richard Alpert, as a boy in California, on the island, but in the 1954(?) time travel event, Alpert had not yet met Locke. In fact, Locke wasn’t even born yet. It’s still very confusing for me, and it helps to write it out like that. I am sometimes a bear of very little brain.

In his piece on last week’s episodes, Mr. Wood also talks about what he calls, after another author, Paul RIcoeur, “cosmological time (time that’s measured; minutes, hours, days) and phenomenological time (time as experienced; past, present, future).” I’m assuming that these terms are the same as Madeleine L’Engle’s chronos and kairos. L’Engle defines chronos as ordinary clock time and kairos as God’s time, in which notions of past and present are irrelevant. In kairos it is possible to arrive at a place and time in a sort of circular route before you ever left it. I wonder if Jack and the rest of the Oceanic Six will return to the island in 2007 or before they left in 2004, perhaps taking advantage of what Wood calls a wormhole or what L’Engle names her book, a wrinkle in time.

Oh, and did you notice that Faraday’s abandoned girlfriend is “unstuck in time”, too? And we still don’t know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Is Widmore an evil exploiter, or is he the benefactor of a sick and helpless victim of Faraday’s dangerous experiments? Or both? If Ben is fighting Widmore, is he a good guy? Who is Abadon and for whom is he working? Is Faraday bad because he abandoned the girl in the bed (Theresa Spencer), or is he good because he’s trying to save the island and Charlotte? But can Faraday be good if he’s working for Widmore?

Awwww, Penny and Desmond have a baby! And Penny’s loyal to the end, even when it looks as if Desmond is headed back to the Island. Can Penny go there, even if she wants to? And they named the baby Charlie. Awwww.

No books or literary references in tonight’s episode that I caught, but next week’s episode is called The Little Prince.

“Men occupy very little space on Earth. If the two billion inhabitants of the globe were to stand close together, as they might for some public event, they would easily fit into a city block that was twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. You could crowd all humanity onto the smallest Pacific islet.
Grown-ups, of course, won’t believe you.”
Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission.

Go to the LOST Books Challenge blog to leave a link to your thoughts on this episode of LOST.