'Lost' Recap: The New Long Con

Sawyer continues to take the lead by hiding Jack, Kate, and Hurley in plain sight, and finding a way to keep Sayid alive

Let me begin by guessing what most of you were thinking at the very end of last night's Lost: Harry Potter. Right? Add a lightening bolt scar and a British accent to that bespectacled pasty white cherubic mug, and young Benjamin Linus would have totally been the spitting image of J.K. Rowling's boy hero. Which is a rather provocative connection to make. Quick! Write me a mini-essay on all the ways Ben Linus = Harry Potter. Be sure to work in the words ''Parselmouth,'' ''chosen one,'' and ''I seem to recall a lot of people wondered if Harry might go bad, which is kinda like Ben, at least in the sense that so many people wonder if Ben is a good guy or a bad guy.'' Send your homework to JeffJensenEW@aol.com. Meanwhile, allow me to forge other connections between ''Namaste'' and Harry Potter that are probably totally irrelevant but somewhat amusing to consider. Didn't Jack, Kate, and Hurley's Dharma orientation feel very Sorting Hat to you? And didn't Sayid's incarceration have a certain Prisoner of Azkaban whiff? (Hey: That book had a time travel hook, too!) And now that I'm really going down the rabbit hole: Hippyish Horace Goodspeed = Professor Dumbledore by way of Michael Gambon; Snippy Radzinsky = Snappy Snape; Body-challenged Jacob = reincarnation-questing Voldemort. And are The Others = Death Eaters scheming to facilitate his reincarnation?

Oh, wait: You came here to actually read about Lost, not Harry Potter, didn't you? ''Namaste'' in a nutshell: Time travel trio Jack, Kate, and Hurley got assimilated into 1977 Dharma society. Time traveler Sayid was suspected of being a ''Hostile'' and got thrown in the Dharma detention center. And back in the present — which in Lost time is the year 2007 — Sun and Lapidus paddled to the big island and learned from Christian ''Dead Man Walking'' Shephard where and when the other castaways are. It was a transitional episode of Lost — an installment that cleared up some unfinished business and put everyone where they needed to be for the episodes to come. Coming out of the two-week break, ''Namaste'' was good for reminding us where we are in the larger season 5 saga.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT TIMING
I know how the time jumping baffles some of you. So let's establish temporal context. It seems those Ajira 316 castaways and the Oceanic 6/Left Behinders are separated by 30 years of time. While there's always been some debate as to when exactly the Oceanic 6 left The Island, I'm going to take the conservative estimate and say it was late December 2004. They spent three years away from The Island before boarding Ajira 316 to head back. Hence: The Ajira/Hydra castaways are in 2007. The time travelers are in 1977.

Got it? I hope so, because we're moving on.

PROJECT: ISLAND RUNWAY
Our landing strip speculations were accurate, after all! Who says tracking arcane bits of Lost mythology is a total waste of time? Besides my psychiatrist and my neglected children, I mean? (Now you know where my Ben's face-slapping anger comes from.) In the opening sequence, we saw that after the Island beamed Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid off of Ajira 316, Captain Frank Lapidus spied a makeshift runway on Hydra Island and successfully executed a landing. (Alas, RIP his shish-kabobbed co-pilot.)

If I am recalling the Lost lore accurately, the Others were working on the landing strip during the time that Kate and Sawyer were stuck in the polar bear cages. In fact, I think Project: Runway was the hard labor the fugitive lovers were assigned during their imprisonment. Sure, the Others may have been making the strip for their own use. But I'm liking the idea that they were making it because they knew — or more precisely because Ben knew — that it needed to be there in the future for Ajira 316. It certainly fits my long-held contention that Ben's machinations have been informed by knowledge of future events. Of course, Ajira landed on Hydra Island roughly three years after Kate and Sawyer's Hydra drama. So it's also possible that the project was started/finished during that three-year span by...well, by someone. Or some peoples.

One more note about the Ajira crash sequence: Did you catch the expression on newcomer Illana's face when the turbulence hit? I couldn't tell if her nonchalance was because she's a frequent flyer who's unfazed by rough air — or if she knew exactly what was about to happen. And did you catch the name she muttered when Caesar shook her awake. I heard ''Sarah.'' What did you hear?

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