Lost: "Confirmed Dead"
Wow, another nailbiter. This show is freakin' brilliant. I had my laptop with me and was jotting notes the entire time, and LOVED it. A couple of moments made me laugh out loud, and I gasped aloud more than once. Here we go...

We meet the “rescuers”... and find out who they’re really here for.

Previously on Lost...
Before I move on to this week’s episode, it turns out last week’s was FULL of Easter eggs that took fans several days to find. Here’s a list of my favorites:
• Abaddon might sound like “abandon,” as I pointed out, but it’s also a Hebrew word meaning “place of destruction,” or underworld. In Revelations, Abaddon is the Angel of the Abyss. Some fans are speculating he’s the smoke monster; when he leaves the room where he unnerves Hurley, there’s a weird shadow left behind him on the door.
• In Jacob’s cabin, the man sitting in the rocking chair was none other than Christian Shephard!
• The eye that appears in the window is up for debate. The general consensus was that it was Locke, but I think this week’s episode debunked that.
• When Hurley crashes his Camaro, you can see Randy (his boss from the Mr. Cluck’s and Locke’s boss at the box company) filming the crash off to the side of the scene.
• Hurley crashes into the Bonneville of Death, that weird car (that could just be a red herring) that Kate crashed into when she had Tom in her car; that hit Michael when he was crossing the street; that hit Locke when he was running through the parking lot of the store after spotting his mother.
• There could be a tie to the North Pole: When Hurley and Jack are playing HORSE, Hurley says, “That’s H-O.” Hurley sees Charlie standing next to the Ho Ho’s. (Think Santa.) H and O are the 8th and 15th letters in the alphabet. This links to polar bears; the guys at the end of season 2 in the blizzard; Desmond saying that they’re stuck in a “snow globe”; Desmond asking for the punchline to the code joke “What did one snowman say to the other snowman?”

Episode Recap:
Through flashbacks, we’re introduced to the four new characters who have been sent to “rescue” the survivors: Daniel Faraday, Miles Straume (ghostbuster... when he hooked up his dustbuster device I looked at my husband and said, “Who the hell is he? Dan Aykroyd??”), Charlotte Lewis (archaeologist), and Frank Lapidus (pilot). On the island, Charlotte is held hostage by Locke and Company, who are on their way to Jacob’s cabin on Walt’s orders, and the other three are with Kate and Jack, who appear to have abandoned the rest of the flock. Through the flashbacks of these characters and Naomi, we discover they’re not exactly there to rescue anyone, but instead are there to find Ben.

Highlights:
• Watching Dan’s landing from his point of view. You can feel his panic as he’s free-falling through the air, looks up at his parachute, looks down to see himself about to hit the trees... it was amazing.
• The looks on everyone’s faces when Locke says he’s getting his orders from Walt. They all look like they’re thinking, “Oh crap... I should have gone with Jack.”
• Locke tells Sawyer that Walt gave him orders to stop Naomi, and Sawyer says, “What, you didn’t ask any follow-up questions?” Ha!
• Ben’s reaction to Karl calling him Mr. Linus: “Karl, now if you’re gonna sleep with my daughter, I insist you call me Ben.”
• Jack telling Miles that they have friends with guns in the jungle, and Sayid and Juliet suddenly appearing.
• Sawyer: “Who are we to argue with Taller Ghost Walt?”

Biggest “GASP!” Moments:
• Locke announcing that if he’d had a kidney, the bullet would have killed him. Does this mean his whole destiny theory is correct? That he was meant to lose the kidney to Anthony Cooper so that he could later live? Did Cooper actually save his life?
• A polar bear in the desert? With a Dharma collar???
• Ben shooting Charlotte! That’s two people in just over 24 hours.
• Miles saying they’re here for Benjamin Linus!
• Locke asking what the smoke monster is... and discovering nothing. (That’s more of an anti-gasp moment, but it was fun anyway.)
• Ben knowing Charlotte’s life story before announcing he has a man on their boat... wha??

Hurley’s Numbers:
When you see the two ROVs underwater, the second one has a fuel reading of 64 (8 x 8); there are 4 team members in the helicopter; when Miles enters the grandson’s room, there’s a 15 on a football poster on the wall; when he puts his ghostbuster device on the table, there’s a coupon stuck to the board on the wall saying something is $15.00; if you add up the numbers in the Oceanic hotline, the sum is 48; the helicopter has the number NB42M on the side of it;

Did You Notice?:
• Zoe Bell is listed in the credits, but I couldn’t tell where she was in the episode. She was Lucy Lawless’s stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess, and was Uma Thurman’s stunt double in Kill Bill. Perhaps she’s a stunt double in this show, too? Or could she have been Virginia, the woman on the phone who talks to Miles at the end? Virginia had a New Zealander accent, like Bell.
• If you played the Find815 alternate reality game, you would have picked up several references to the game in this episode. Among them: the salvage boat is called the Christiane I, which is the name of the boat in the game; the wreckage is found on the Sunda Trench, which is where Sam is told Sonya has been found; and the room where Miles does his ghostbusting looks exactly like Sam’s bedroom.
• Jeremy Davies’ character is named Daniel Faraday. One of the names the villain in Stephen King’s The Stand uses is “Russell Faraday.” Apparently the character on Lost was originally named Russell, but by the time they started filming they changed it to Daniel.
• Vincent’s gone with Locke’s group. That can only mean something terrible is going to happen to them.
• Locke predicts the end of the rain, a throwback to season 1. I love when they make us remember things that happened three years ago.
• Locke looks at Hurley with shock when he mentions the cabin, which means it wasn’t his eye last week looking out or he’d have known Hurley was there.
• Sawyer calls Locke Colonel Kurtz, which is probably the most apt nickname he’s ever given someone. Not only is Locke bald, but he appears to be deranged, and is now leading others down his dark path with him.
• Miles appears to have landed on the flats where Inman died.
• When Miles does his exorcism, the woman at the house is named Mrs. Gardner. In 1941, a skeleton was found on Gardner Island, and many believe it to have been the remains of Amelia Earhart. It’s widely assumed that the Adam and Eve skeletons of season 1 are based on Amelia Earhart and her male companion.
• It seems Sawyer’s gone with Locke’s group not because of his faith in John Locke, but in Hurley. When Locke insists that Sawyer not kill Ben, Sawyer looks at Hurley, who quietly shakes his head, and only then does Sawyer walk away.
• When we first see Frank’s flashback, he’s dropping a toy plane into an aquarium and it lands upside-down. It looks like he’s been doing this for a while, always with the same result, as if he knows the plane found on the ocean floor – right-side up – is a fake.
• All of the four crew members have some affiliation with the crash, ranging from major to minor: Frank was supposed to be the pilot of the plane, and calls Oceanic to say the body in the wreckage is not the actual pilot’s; Charlotte doesn’t believe the plane crashed, either, and uncovers a polar bear wearing a Dharma collar and seems to know the significance of it; Dan watches news of the fake crash on television and is inexplicably moved and upset by it; Miles simply hears the news on the radio of the crash site being found and turns the radio off.
• Frank is from Eleuthera in The Bahamas; eleuthera is derived from the Greek word for “free.”
• Naomi’s mission was to get them in, get them out, and prevent anyone from being killed. Looks like the mission’s already a failure.
• Charlotte is from Essex, England, and Dan is from Essex, Massachusetts.
• Charlotte Staples Lewis is clearly named after Clive Staples Lewis, a.k.a. C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series. That series of books is about stepping from one world into the next, as if the universe is a series of parallel realities. One of the favorite fan theories is that all of the action in the flashbacks, flashforwards, and island is happening at the same time, in parallel universes.
• Looking for Hurley’s numbers, I ended up finding the number 29 twice. At the beginning the second rover changes his coordinates to 137. If you subtract 108 from that number (the sum of Hurley’s numbers), it comes out to 29. Also, on the helicopter you see the letters N, B, M. Assign numbers based on their position in the alphabet (14, 2, 13) and they add up to 29.
• Lostpedia says this episode happens on December 24, 2004, which means we’ll soon be on Christmas. One can only imagine what will happen on that day.

So Many Questions...
• So why was Dan so upset when he watches the news?
• Did the magnetic anomaly bring the helicopter down?
• Why did they have scuba masks on board?
• How does Miles’ machine help him talk to ghosts?
• How did the polar bear end up in the desert, with a Dharma collar on it?
• Was that one of Mikhail’s cows that Frank comes face-to-face with?
• If Frank was able to set the plane down okay, why is he so beat up?
• Note the way Abaddon says to Naomi, “There were no survivors of Oceanic 815,” as if to say, “You will make sure there were no survivors of Oceanic 815.” Is it part of their mission to make that statement a reality?
• Why couldn’t George Minkowski come to the phone?
• Is Ben telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know what the smoke monster is?
• How the hell did Ben know all of that stuff about Charlotte? Who does he have on the boat?? This is the place where I’d usually ask if he’s telling the truth, but if he was looking to make believers out of us, listing off Charlotte’s entire life story pretty much did it for me.

Where to Look:
If you’re looking for more Easter eggs, I think there are a few scenes that will be full of them. They’ll just need more time, and a LOT more screencaps:
• The ocean floor at the beginning where the two rovers are searching.
• The bedroom of the grandson.
• The place where Frank is watching the television.

Next week: We discover another member of the Oceanic Six.