LOST: Episode 6.05, 'Lighthouse'

Episode Title: "Lighthouse"

Written By: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof

Story: Hurley (Jorge Garcia) is once again visited by the late Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), who tells the unlucky lottery winner that he has to visit a lighthouse on the island — and he has to bring Jack (Matthew Fox) with him. Elsewhere on the island, Claire (Emilie de Ravin) proves to Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) just how far off the deep end she is thanks to her trusty axe and a little bit of help from her "friend."

In the sideways reality, Jack attempts to locate his father's missing body, but he resolves a different family issue instead — an issue that's quite surprising for the viewers back home.

All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues: The differences between island time and the sideways reality continue to grow with the biggest change yet — Sideways Jack is a father. His son, David, is a young adolescent and a musical prodigy with some serious angst towards his father, not unlike Jack's own troubled relationship with Christian. Although Sideways Jack isn't initially the greatest father, he eventually overcomes his failings and wins David over with some emotional support and the promise of pizza.

Clearly, there are some major questions to ponder here — how did detonating the bomb in 1977 cause such a ripple in space-time that Jack has a son? Is it a sign that the sideways reality isn't necessarily contingent upon that incident? Who is David's mother? What is David's importance?

Ruptured: Jack's fatherhood isn't the only oddity in his sideways life. During his morning routine, Sideways Jack notices a scar where his appendix should be, but he doesn't seem to remember how he got his appendix removed. On the island, he loses his appendix in an emergency surgery after it ruptures, but in the sideways, his father removed it when Jack was a child.

The fact that Jack noticed the strangeness of his scar is just another sign that the two realities are linked and, moreover, could be merging. It seems that bits of fact and fiction are colliding, that history is fixing itself — that the universe is course correcting, as Eloise Hawking would say, to fix a rupture in the space-time continuum.

Adam & Eve: On the island, Hurley and Jack journey towards a mysterious lighthouse, but not before making a pit stop at the old caves they used to use as shelter. There, they rediscover "Adam and Eve," the long decomposed bodies that we haven't seen since the first season. While we didn't learn anything new about these curious corpses, their very reintroduction suggests that we're going to get a pay off down the line. The "Lost" writers haven't forgotten about this lingering mystery — before the series is over, we'll get an answer here. My money is still on Rose and Bernard on this one.

Light 'em Up: The lighthouse expedition ends with seven years of bad luck — or, at least, three broken mirrors. Apparently, Jack's violent temper tantrum was exactly what Jacob wanted. Jack's got a purpose, according to the deceased island mystic, but he can't be told what it is — he has to figure it out for himself. I guess the audience does, too.

But here's one concrete fact we gleaned from the excursion — you can see Jack's house from the lighthouse, at least at the right angle. Jacob wanted Jack to know that he's been watching him, because it proves just how important he is in the grand scheme of things. If it wasn't official already, I think it's now safe to believe Smocke's (Terry O'Quinn) assertion that Jacob has been pushing Jack and the other candidates towards the island for quite some time. To what end, unfortunately, remains unclear.

Claire Claims Crazy: Miss Littleton has seen better days. She's so convinced that Aaron has been abducted by the Others that she's willing to axe fools in the chest just to find him. She misses him so much that she's constructed a furry dead animal doll to sleep in his crib. She regularly talks with her dead father and her new "friend" — none other than Smocke himself.

Clearly, getting claimed by the Smoke Monster isn't the most fortunate thing in the world, but Claire seems fairly content with her mysterious ally. Then again, when and if she finds out that Jin was telling the truth — that Kate (Evangeline Lily) really did take Aaron off the island, that Smocke has been fooling her — I wonder how sturdy her loyalty will be. Once claimed, are you irreversibly bound to one master? Can you swing to the other side of the fence? If you can, and if Claire learns the truth, I don't think she's a completely lost cause... but she certainly could use a bath and a haircut either way.

Easter Eggs: Jack's son is a Red Sox fan, something that Christian Shephard would never approve of. Jin has hearts on his boxers. Jack used to read "Alice in Wonderland" to his son as a baby, just as he did to Aaron after he left the island. There was a bottle of MacCutcheon brand whiskey in Christian's office, the same drink of choice for one Charles Widmore. At David's piano audition, there was a sign saying: "Welcome all candidates." The lighthouse wheel needed to be turned 108 degrees, the summation of the mysterious numbers.

Best Quote: "Sometimes you can just hop in the back of someone's cab and tell them what to do. Other times, you have to let them look out at the ocean for a while." — Jacob's stance on destiny.

The Shape of Things to Come: Next week's installment, entitled "Sundown," is so mysterious that ABC decided to censor the preview for the episode. But here's what we already know: Jacob told Hurley that someone bad is coming to the temple, which is exactly where Jin said he'd lead Claire right before Smocke appeared in her tent. Something tells me that we're in for a bloodbath next week — and if you ask me, it's about bloody time.

Tell us what you thought of "Lighthouse" in the comments section or on Twitter!

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