s4e11: Cabin Fever

A plot: Locke, Hurley and Ben go looking for Jacob's cabin.

This plot really kind of mixed the amusing and the creepy. Just look at the first scene where they're arguing about who's leading the way, or where Hurley splits his Apollo Bar with Ben... then, at the same time, look at, well, the entire scene in the cabin, or Locke's dream sequence where Horace tells him how to find the cabin. (It turns out that Horace built the cabin, apparently.) Oh, and Locke's very literal use of "pit stop" made me smile.

Anyway, Christian (dead) and Claire (not dead?) are inside the cabin, and they tell Locke what he needs to do - move the island. What in the fuck?

B plot: Various confrontations on the boat as Keamy plans to return to the island in force.

A very tense, action-heavy plot. Keamy comes back and confronts Michael for ratting him out to Ben, but the gun misfires when he tries to kill him. (Michael is impervious right now, apparently.) Keamy gets the "secondary protocol," which apparently tells him the only place Ben can go to hide if the island is "torched." Captain Overacting doesn't exactly agree with Keamy's plan and gives Sayid (and Desmond, who elects not to return to the island) a boat. Also, we see the ship receive the Morse code message about Dr. Ecklie, who's still alive and well - and then he's killed and tossed overboard. So clearly there's a big time issue here. In a big confrontation, Captain Overacting is shot by Keamy, and Frank decides to fly them back to the island after initially resisting. Meanwhile, Keamy has had some odd device attached to him, which I'm sure will come into play later.

C plot: In our brief view of the beach, Jack et al. receive the radio/GPS that Frank drops. Aaaand that's about it.

Flashback: In our first full pre-crash flashback since the second-to-last episode of Season Three (Charlie's "Greatest Hits"), we learn significant and confusing information about Locke's long-term ties to the island's mythology.

So Baby Locke was ridiculously premature but he managed to battle off all kinds of infections and survive. Then we see - dum dum DUM! - Richard Alpert, who visits Baby Locke in the hospital and then Kid Locke, giving the latter some sort of Dalai Lama test, as Drew noted. Kid Locke fails, but that's clearly not the end of it, as Mittelos Bioscience tries to recruit Teen Locke, who might have gone for it if he'd been getting laid. Sadly, he's unpopular, and rejects the idea as he has no intention of being more unpopular. Finally, we see Wheelchair Locke during his rehab, where he meets with - dum dum DUM!!!! - Matthew Abaddon, who, we discover, is responsible for planting the idea in Locke's head that he should go on the walkabout.

So the question thus is: did Matthew Abaddon, who appears to be on the Widmore side later, point Locke towards Australia because he knew Locke's plane would crash, ridding the world of the Others' "chosen one?" Or because he knew it would crash in such a way that Locke would get to the island? Either way, how did and could he know? And the whole "when you and me run into each other again, you'll owe me one" - time traveling? Or just knowing the future somehow?

All in all, a pretty strong episode. Now we just have three hours of finale left over the next three weeks (one, off, two). Can you say awesome?