'Lost' Recap: Married To It

The geek in me wants to start with Smokey, the frozen donkey wheel, and the significance of a Magical Jin. The gentleman in me wants to start by apologizing to Sun for impugning her mothering skills (my theory last week was debunked in the first scene: Ji Yeon is alive, well, and skinny) and congratulate her on renewing her wedding vows. But really, we should begin this recap of the ominously entitled ''This Place Is Death'' by paying our respects to the dead. So let's swipe one of Ms. Hawking's votive candles and light one for Charlotte Staples Lewis, whose bloody passing was charged with mythic buzz. The time travel sickness munched up more and more of her brain, then swallowed it whole. In her final wild-eyed, pale-faced moments, her mind became unmoored and began to toggle between past and present. ''Oh turn it up, I love Geronimo Jackson,'' she cooed, referring to Lost's faux hippy-era folk group. (I get a Three Dog Night/''Road To Shambala'' vibe off the name.) And she gave up some secrets. Yes, she had been born on the Island. Her mom and dad were members of The Dharma Initiative. But Dad went loco and Mom got spooked. She packed up Charlotte (''Why isn't Daddy coming with us?'' Charlotte murmured during her throes, perhaps flashing on the moment) and took her to London and told her that Island was just a childhood fantasy — a land of make-believe, like the Narnia concocted by Charlotte's literary namesake. And then this bombshell: ''Leave the Island and never come back,'' said a scary man from her Island youth — a bogeyman with more than a passing resemblance to her would-be boyfriend, Daniel Faraday. ''I'm not supposed to have chocolate before dinner,'' she blurted, her mind suddenly elsewhere. And then she was gone for good.

The temptation of chocolate takes us somewhere, too — namely, straight to hell. In C.S. Lewis' first Chronicles of Narnia novel, The White Witch — a stand-in for Satan; the incarnation of death — seduced Edmund into betraying his siblings with an English delicacy made of chocolate known as Turkish Delight. For Charlotte, the Island was her Turkish Delight — her forbidden fruit — and chasing after it led to her doom. ''This place is death!'' she bellowed, and I couldn't tell in that moment if her mind was in the present, speaking of her killer environs, or if it was in the past, passing along something she had been told.

Digging deeper into the Charlotte/Lewis connection, we sinker deeper into an abyss of subtext. Along the way, we pass A Grief Observed, Lewis' chronicle about the death of his companion, Joy, and how it tested his Christian faith. Then, there's The Great Divorce, which actually isn't about marital dissolution but a fantastical vision of the afterlife, à la Dante's Inferno, although it was actually meant as a parable about living in the here and now. (The title is a riff on — and the book a response to — William Blake's surreal manifesto, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) These are stories about the underworld, the mythical place where souls hang after they've shed the mortal coil. And now recall the Egyptian hieroglyphics in "The Hatch," which according to the producers of Lost translated into ''Underworld.'' And Smokey's scene-stealing, arm -ripping presence in this episode reminds us that the guy who made the Map in "The Hatch" called the Monster by a different name: ''Cerberus,'' the three-headed demon dog that guarded the gates of Hades. And finally, know that Christian Shepherd, the dude with the Jesus pun name, played the part of ''psychopomp'' in this episode — a ''psychopomp'' being a mythic underworld figure who serves as a ''guide to souls,'' escorting the dead between states of existence. Psychopomp?! Yes: Psychopomp! Psychopomp! Psychopomp! Psychopomp! You can't just say it enough. PSYCHOPOMP!

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