Have We LOST Charlotte?

With a title like that, I suppose anyone trying to avoid spoilers about tonight's episode will have already averted their eyes. But as LOST gets more interesting in all sorts of science fictiony ways, I imagine those who are disliking the disclosure of the series' true genre are getting more and more annoyed. But let's be honest. Unless you couldn't care less about the mysteries raised from the very first season, there had to be a sci-fi component. Hatches and monsters and electromagnetism - it has all been leading here, and if you've come this far, you ought to stay and see what it is the series has been leading towards.

And now, for a recap of highlights. If you've watched it, or can't watch it soon and can't wait to know what happened, here are some of the gloriously interesting moments...

Jin's time-jumping are allowing us the equivalent of flashbacks about Rousseau even though the older Rousseau is no longer there to have them. We learn that the monster is what Danielle believed made Robert and the others "sick". It changed them. "Robert" said the monster is a security system guarding the temple.

Charlotte speaks Korean - and claims to also speak Klingon! After a flash, Charlotte pleads with Jin not to let them "bring her back", because "this place is death". As she gets more and more unstuck in time, Charlotte wonders why daddy can't come with them, and claims to know more about ancient Carthage than Hannibal himself. She also loves Geronimao Jackson - which proved she once lived among the Dharma folks before she came out and said it. Charlotte also tells them that the Orchid will be where the well is. Eventually, she also tells Daniel that she grew up on the island but then her mother moved away with her, and she never saw her father again, and her mother said Charlotte had made up the island. She's been trying to get back ever since - that's why she became an anthropologist. She remembers a 'crazy man' from when she was little, who scared her and told her that if she ever came back to the island she'd die, and she thinks that man was Daniel!

Charlotte appears to die in this episode, although perhaps she is only "mostly dead"! But even if she has died, with all this time-jumping, and the possibility that there are some to whom the rules don't apply, we still may not have seen the last of her.

When John gets underground by going down the well (although a flash makes the well vanish), Christian Shepherd finds him and rebukes him for having not done what he was told: he was supposed to move the island, not Ben. Christian suggests that listening to Ben never brought him any good - yet Christian tells John about Eloise Hawking, who seems to have a better view of Ben. But perhaps Ben has changed over the three years that intervened.

The "donkey wheel" had slipped off its axis - and that might be the reason for the flashes and the skipping around in time.

At the end, we seem to have confirmed for us that Eloise Hawking is indeed Daniel Faraday's mother. And the cliffhanger ending sets the stage for some revelations in next week's episode.