s4e01: The Beginning of the End

We're in full-on flash-forward mode, as the show opens with Hurley in a drawn-out car chase; as he's dragged away by the cops, he screams if they know who he is. "I'm one of the Oceanic Six!" So right away we know that only six people got off the island, and we already know who three of them are (Jack, Kate, and now Hurley). Suspicious, to say the least. Anyway. Hurley ends up getting grilled by Ana Lucia's old partner; he claims not to have known her or even met her. (To be fair, the cop's description was a little vague had Hurley only met her in passing. "Dark hair, gorgeous?" Well, there isn't anyone else like that on the island!) Hurley was running because he saw something in a convenience store and fled from it, but he won't say what. The cop ends up offering to commit him, which Hurley gladly accepts. Then he receives a visit from a sinister dude who claims to be a representative of Oceanic; he offers to put Hurley up in a swankier mental hospital. Hurley sniffs out the dude as not really from Oceanic; the guy asks what happened to everyone else. Hurley freaks out and the guy takes off. Later, Hurley is sitting outside when a fellow patient tells him he's being stared at. The starer turns out to be - bum bum bum!!! - Charlie. Charlie tells Hurley he has to go back to the island, but Hurley doesn't want to listen. He closes his eyes and counts to five, and Charlie vanishes. In the final bit of flash-forward, Hurley gets a visit from Jack, clearly not yet the bearded freako of last season's finale. Jack is mostly there to make sure that Hurley isn't going to tell people about... well, it's a secret for now, clearly, but it's obviously the same sort of deal alluded to in the finale (when Jack tells Kate he's sick of lying). The fact that only six people made it back when we know there are dozens alive is, after all, suspect. Hurley says to Jack that he doesn't think they did the right thing. Jack tells Hurley they're never going back to the island; "Never say never, dude," Hurley calls after him.

Back on the island in "present" times, Naomi crawls into the jungle as she thinks Locke hit her with the knife on behalf of the whole group. Kate convinces her otherwise and Naomi conceals the true nature of her injury from the guy on the boat before dying of it, but she manages to fix the signal first and another guy (Jeremy Davies with an oddly island-looking beard) parachutes in at the end of the episode. Before that, the news is broken to everyone that Charlie died and that he revealed that Penny was not connected to the boat before doing so. While walking through the jungle, Hurley stumbles across Jacob's house, where it appears Locke may have been having a conversation; it looks like Hurley was able to see Jacob. When everyone finally meets up, Jack jumps Locke and tries to kill him, but Locke's gun isn't loaded. Sayid and Sawyer still have to pull Jack off Locke. Locke repeats Ben's talking points that the people on the boat are not there for anyone's benefit, but of course people aren't exactly queueing up behind him. Then Hurley gives an impassioned speech about trusting Charlie's final message, and he decides to go with Locke (although when talking to Jack in the flash-forward, Hurley apologizes for going with Locke); subsequently, so do a lot of people, including Claire and Sawyer. Jack also relinquishes Ben to Locke's charge. And then, again, Jack and Kate are hanging out at the fuselage piece in the jungle when Jeremy Davies parachutes in. Jack seems wary; I don't know if it's supposed to be that he's having second thoughts about the whole boat thing, or because Jeremy Davies is kind of creepy-looking (Upham, you bastard!) and has a weird beard going.

I was watching online (sadly, I have class Thursday nights now and my TV isn't working with TiVo at the moment, so I have to watch it Friday online and hope no one ruins anything in the interim) so I didn't get to see the "Next time on Lost," so let's start a new feature wherein I pose the most interesting questions this episode left us with:

1. Charlie admits to being dead and he seems to vanish awfully quick when Hurley closes his eyes, but if he's a hallucination, how did the other patient know that he was there?

2. What kind of deal (or something?) was struck, and why did only six people make it back? If only six were allowed back - we can assume that everyone else is not dead as Charlie states that they need Hurley's help - what happened to the rest of them?

3. Who the fuck is on that boat?

4. Why does Hurley apologize for going with Locke, especially when he seems at that point to fall into the camp of "shouldn't have left"?

There's plenty more, of course, but there always is. I'm really looking forward to this season, although I wish that goddamn writer's strike would just end already so we aren't held to eight episodes. I don't think there's been a bad Lost episode since that stupid Nikki and Paolo one, and if you don't count that since it barely had anything to do with anything, there hasn't been a bad one - bad is maybe kind of strong, but certainly "lesser" - since that "teaser" six-episode block at the start of last season. 16 episodes a year is going to suit this show just fine, methinks.