I'll be taking the live-blog duties tonight. I'm already on pins and needles. Will DreadLocke kill Richard? Is he allowed to? Who's the blond kid with all the rules? How will Sawyer get back up the cliff? Is my name written on Jacob's graffiti ceiling? Doggone it, will Dana finally kill Kevin and spare us any more of that awful subplot!?!? (Oh, wait. Wrong show).

Major spoilers below the fold . . .

Previously on Lost: flight 815 lands without Christian Shephard's casket. Sayid is drowned and resurrected. Dagon pushes poison pills to Jack for Sayid, to cure the darkness growing in him. "It happened to your sister".

Shot of CrazyClaire.

Show starts. Jack gets home and does the look in the mirror thing that all the Lost characters have been doing this season. He tries to remember how he got that bad scar on his abdomen.

His mom calls - still no casket. Jack says that they think the coffin is in Berlin. Also, his mom can't find Christian's will.

The scar is an appendix scar, she reminds him. Jack's having trouble remembering, and then rudely hangs up on his mom. Seriously, she was in mid sentence. Jack seems kind of stressed out.

He is in a car and pulls up to . . . a school. To pick up his son David. Yes, that's right, his teenage son David.

Flash sideways to the island. Jack is looking in the island equivalent of a mirror; a lake outside the temple. Dagon walks up and they start to chat. Dagon is concerned that Kate, Jin and Sawyer are not coming back. Jack lets him know that his concerns are valid. I'm concerned about why we're not seeing the John Lennon translator anymore. If Dagon's going to start talking English to everyone that dude's out of a job.

Meanwhile, Hurley and Miles play tic-tac-toe on a giant bamboo board. Tied again. "Hungry?", "Are you?", "I could eat" Heh. Hugo asks a guy squatting by the dirty pool of healing for directions to the kitchen. The dude is Jacob, who tells Hurley to get a pen.

"Someone's coming to the island. I need you to help them find it."

LOST LOGO WITH EERIE MUSIC . . .

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Back home. David (who goes to a private school, incidentally) is home. Jack walks him up to his room and he immediately starts to study, so that's weird (he's a teenager after all). He's also reading Alice in Wonderland.

By the way, Jack he no likee. He walks out of the room.

Jack follows him to the kitchen and tries to strike up a conversation, but David is not interested in conversation or, evidently, a relationship of any kind.

Jack's mom calls so he heads over to her house

Where did this kid come from again? The alternate reality is more different than we thought.

FS, back to the temple. Sayid walks around, looking battle-ready in his black tank top. Everyone's staring at him. Sayid knows that everyone knows he has an infection, and exposits a bit to Jack about what's been going on to catch us all up. Jack lets him know that the pill was poison and also says the infection has happened to someone else. Sayid asks who, and. instead of an answer, he gets a dark look from Jack and a scene cut to Jin's bloody leg stuck in a bear trap.

Claire frees him. She looks terrible but otherwise seems rational, if not cheerful. His leg looks terrible too and Jin faints from the pain.

Back to the temple, Hurley evidently couldn't find any paper and has written on his arm. Hard-core Lost fans everywhere will be looking closely at that screencap. Hugo's in a temple corridor looking at symbols on the wall.

Dagon finds him and orders him out, but Hurley's shoulder-angel named Jacob appears and tells Hurley what to say.

"I'm a candidate, I can do what I want". Tell him Hurley! Dagon has to leave, cursing Hurley in NotEnglish all the way out.

Jacob tells Hurley that he has to get Jack to go with him on an adventure. Hurley's still freaking out over standing up to the "Samurai dude", but gets Jacob's instructs well enough and walks over to where Jack is just sitting idly and sidemouths to him that he is to wait ten seconds and then follow him. Jack thinks Hurley is off his darn nut and tells him that he's not going anywhere. Hurley then pulls Jack's strings, per Jacob's advice, by telling Jack he "has what it takes". For some reason, that totally works, because now Jack is all in.

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Jin wakes up. He's still in a lot of pain, lying on an old dirty mattress in the Claire Lair. And, holy cow, she's got dynamite.

She also has a cradle with the creepy skeleton of some dead animal lovingly laid in it. Jin gawks at that, but just then Claire shows up with the Good Cop Temple Other from last week's show, who she ties up. Claire still seems pretty rational, and tells Jin, when he asks her if she's been alone all this time, that, no, she's not been by herself all this time. Crazy grin, and maybe the volume on that rationality I was catching there just got turned down a notch.

Good cop is really scared of Claire.

Cut over to Hurley and Jack, who have cleverly (and evidently effortlessly) slipped through the impregnable Temple outer-defenses and are walking along a jungle path. They come upon Kate who comes this close to shooting Jack. She and Jack share a laugh over that.

Kate insists that she's not going back to the temple. She's going to find Claire. Jack tells Kate that Claire's not at the beach (wait, was he at the beach at some point?) and that "something happened to her". Jack tells Kate to come back to the temple but Hurley sidemouths to Jack that Jacob said only Hurley and Jack could go back. Kate's fine with that and walks off.

I'm fine with that too. No more Kate this episode please.

FS to Alter-LA. Jack and his whiskey swilling mom are searching through files looking for the will. Between drinks, she tells him it's good that he's not drinking, so I'm guessing he's had some problems with the drinky-drinky even in this alternate universe. At least some things are constant.

"How's David holding up?" she asks. Evidently he was really upset at the funeral, which Jack seems surprised about. His mom reminisces about Jack's relationship with his dad back when Jack was David's age. Jack admits he was terrified of his dad back in those days.

Jack's mom finds the will and opens it.

"Jack?"

"Yeah"

"Did your father ever mention a Claire Littleton?"

FS to the Claire Lair. Claire is sharpening an ax. For obvious reasons, the Other is trying to get Jin to loosen his ropes, so he can snap Claire's neck. Jin isn't so ready to let a perfect stranger murder his good, if deranged, friend.

She pours something painful on Jin's leg and expertly stitches him up. She also mentions that she's going to question (torture) the Other to find out where Aaron is.

She mentions that "her friend" told her that the Others have Aaron. He asks who her friend is, but she evades the question by asking him if he's still her friend. Crazy smile.

Then she creepily stands in front of the Other, holding the ax loosely.

"So, now it's your turn"

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Hurley and Jack walk through the jungle. Hurley apologizes for "wrecking [Jack's] game with Kate.". Jack rightfully points out that there was nothing to wreck. So Kate's now been publicly rejected by the other two points of the Jateyer triangle. Give thanks.

Jack finds Shannon's old asthma inhaler, and they realize that they are at the Caves. He and Hurley find the Adam and Eve skeletons.

Hurley wonders if they time-travelled back to "dinosaur times", and died and got buried here. "What if these skeletons are us?" A shout-out to the speculators . . .

Jack tells Hurley that he found this place because he was chasing the ghost of his dead father.

FS to La-la LA. Jack brings home a pizza for David, but David appears to have left home. All his stuff's gone (or very, very neatly put away). Later that night, Jack continues to try and call David. "If I did something to upset you I'm really, really sorry." Jack means it. He drives over to David's mom's house and rings the doorbell. No answer. So he gets a key from under a stone lawn doohicky and opens the door. He searches around the house but no David. Jack goes up to David's room and looks at David's music (classical), an old photo-booth picture of them both, and listens to David's phone messages. David has been accepted to a conservatory. The next message is Jack calling from Sydney. Jack gets teary-eyed.

FS to Jack and Hurley in the jungle. "This is cool, dude. Very old school. You know, you and me, trekkin' through the jungle on our way to do something we don't understand. Good times." Heh.

Hurley asks Jack why he came back. Instead of answering (this is Lost, after all), Jack asks him why he came back. Hurley tells him about Jacob jumping into his cab.

"I came back here because I was broken, and I was stupid enough to think this place could fix me," Jack answers.

"Dude, I'm real sorry"

They arrive at this brick lighthouse that I've never seen before.

"How is that that we've never seen it before?"

"Guess we weren't looking for it."

Really? I would imagine you'd be able to see that thing from many points on the island. Oh well.

Back to Claire. She is interrogating the Other and is about ready to chop him up. The Other keeps denying that they have Aaron.

Jin is very alarmed, and finally yells out "Kate took him! Kate took Aaron when she left the island!"

Claire stares at him in disbelief.

The Other tells her to untie him and he'll leave, and will never come back, as Claire starts to cry.

Oh, then she kills the Other with the ax.

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Hurley and Jack walk up to the lighthouse. Seriously, how did they miss this thing?

Hurley thinks Jacob is in here, and that they have to go upstairs and turn the lighthouse on. The door's locked but Jack kicks it in, sending a tingle up Jared's leg.

FS: Alternate LA - Jack's at a piano recital, and comes to find out that David is freakin' incredible at the piano.

Some kid asks Jack if that's his son. The kid is oriental looking. Wouldn't you know, Dagon is his dad.

"they are too young to have this kind of pressure, aren't they?" Dagon says to Jack. They talk for awhile about how good David is, and Jack admits that he doesn't know how long David has been playing.

FS to the lighthouse. Hurley and Jack have made it to the top. The lighthouse has a mirror assembly - this is an analog lighthouse, after all.

"Where's Jacob?" asks Jack.

"Ah he's not here yet," replies Hurley. "Let's get started. Tell me when it gets to 1.21 Gigawatts 108 degrees"

Jack looks at himself in the multi-faceted mirror assembly as it rotates to 108 degrees. Jack makes Hurley stop, because he sees something in the mirror. Then Jack sees that there are names etched along the degree arc on the outside of this assembly. Shephard is at 23 degrees, so Jack makes Hurley turn it there, as Hurely protests. When he turns it there, Jack can see the house where he grew up in the mirror. He realizes that all this time, all their lives, Jacob has been watching them.

Jack wants to know why Jacob has been watching them. Jack is getting all crazy-eyed now. He starts yelling at Hurley, which kinda makes me mad.

Then Jack smashes all the mirrors. Man! Jack!!!

(Sitting near me on the couch, my 12 year old says under his breath: "Idiot.").

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FS to outside the conservatory. David walks over to his bike. Jack stalks up to him to tell him that he was great.

"You saw me? . . . I missed a couple of notes."

Jack tells him it sounded perfect, and scolds him for scaring him. And he admits that he didn't know David still played.

David had made his mom not tell Jack that he was still playing. He didn't want Jack to see him fail.

"When I was your age my father didn't want to see me fail, and he said I didn't have what it takes. I don't ever want you to feel that way. I will always love you, no matter what you do. In my eyes you can never fail. I just want to be a part of your life."

David says "Ok". So they smile and head back to the house to eat pizza.

FS back to the island. Jack is sitting on a cliff looking out at the ocean. Jacob shows up and Hurley's pretty miffed.

"You have ink on your forehead," Jacob notes.

"Jack broke your lighthouse dude! Mission UNaccomplished!"

Jacob doesn't seem to care. It turns out he was just tricking Hurley (because he's evil, as I've noted before), so that Jack could see how important he is. And Jack has to find that out for himself.

As a side note, one thing I love about Hurley is he's never sitting around mealy-mouthing about whether he's important or not.

Jacob makes excuses for lying to Hugo. He had to get them away from the temple because someone is coming there. Someone bad. It's a mystery, though. I can't quite Locke onto who Jacob is talking about. I'm thinking through all the people it might be, but I keep hitting a BLocke. And, looking at the CLocke, I see I have to keep live-blogging here, so I guess we won't know who that bad someone is until next week or the week after.

Back in the ClaireLair, the Other is still dead (even though Claire only buried that ax about 3 inches into his abdomen and he should still be alive, albeit screaming in pain). Jin is nervous, and can you blame him? Claire asks him why he said Kate was raising Aaron.

Jin tells Claire that he was lying, and tells Claire that Aaron is at the temple, and that the Others have her baby. This seems like a strange strategy to me. Jin, I wouldn't mess with this poor woman's crazy mind if I were you.

Plus, why are you LYING! Claire seems relieved, though, because if Kate was really raising Aaron, she'd totally kill her.

It's at this point that John Locke shows up. Jin points this out to Claire.

"That's not John. This is my friend."

Crazy music, crazy smile from Claire

Next week - Questions WILL be answered!

I just want a good episode. I'm not sure what I think of this one.

To be fair, though, at least we've found out how Jacob knows everything about everyone.

It's the mirrors.

Bad Wobot.