But, if that’s not so and y’all are right…there’s this issue of ‘new memories’ that become part of one’s psyche once the time-travellers do whatever they do… for example, when Desmond wakes up with a new ‘memory’ of Daniel at the hatch door telling him to go find his mother. So that’s a way to explain all those, “if so and so was there in the 70s, why didn’t some other so and so remember them in 2004?” type questions.

oh who cares, its so fun to ponder that it really doesnt matter which theory is gonna turn out to be the right one

so there.

Probably pulling too much from a couple small quotes, but anyway: The Yemi we see says “you speak to me as if I was your brother,” but Christian says “say hello to my son.” One of these entities sees himself as still part of the family he was in during his life, the other doesn’t. I think that is actually Christian but not really Yemi. It seems like Locke is just like he was before, but there could be different degrees of coming back to life. Locke is alive again whereas Christian just isn’t dead.

And thanks very much for the compliments!

And yeah, those eyes are soulful and haunted. Naveen does such an excellent job of bringing this deeply conflicted character to life and has done since the beginning. Next to Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson, he’s easily the best actor on the show (though no disrespect AT ALL to folks like Yunjin Kim, Jorge Garcia, and Elizabeth Mitchell, who also have serious chops, and to Josh Holloway, who’s really managed to improve over the course of the show!).

But then, his is a unique and literally miraculous case.

Christian on the other hand really does seem more like an Island manifestation given that he’s able to do things like appear and disappear in places at will (to Michael on the freighter, to Jack in the hospital in LA, etc.).

Gotta disagree with you on Locke and Ben, who along with Des & Sayid are my favorite characters on the show. Locke is obviously crucial to the endgame or he wouldn’t keep getting healed repeatedly, then actually brought back from the dead, and his story is easily as meaningful as Desmond’s. I’m really pulling for our master of games to make the insightful move that finally defeats all other players in the game (Ben, Widmore, Hawking, the Island itself) for the benefit of all.

It could be that or it could also be, as other recappers have pointed out, a stray transmission akin to the one of Glenn Miller that Sayid and Hurley heard long ago.

We’ll have to see about changing the future…if it’s going to happen, it’s going to require a lot of people being in the right places to do so. All the Lostaways…Desmond (and possibly Walt) in particular…Ben, Widmore, etc.

I’m convinced that a battle over making just exactly such a change is really what the big Island chess game is actually all about.

Mind, so did Eloise Hawking, so it’s clearly not just the Island/Jacob.

1) Getting the DHARMA Initiative to not just tolerate the presence of, but actually recruit a bunch of strange castaways with a decidedly fishy story on force of charm and mental agility alone, landing himself the bloody Head of Security job and getting both Jin and Miles in there with him.
2) Never giving up the search for Locke’s and the O6′s return.
3) Defusing the situation with Alpert without getting anyone hurt or killed who hadn’t been already.
4) TELLING his own people what he was planning and keeping them in the loop in something resembling a timely fashion.
5) Not being stupid enough to “play Nostradamus.”
6) Actually being an impressive enough Head of Security for three solid years to even get the grumptastic Chang to call him a “good man” to an incredulous Jack.
7) Managing to finagle places in the DI for Jack, Kate & Hurley on literally a moment’s notice.

So, yes, Sawyer was a selfish asshat (albeit an entertaining one to us fans) early on, but after just 100 or so days on the Island had actually completed his transmogrification into Beg Damn Hero and Leader of the People.

As for Jack’s miraculous leadership “holding them together,” in only 3 months he managed to lose a good 1/3 to 1/2 of “his people” to a mutiny by Locke, to piss off the Others on numerous occasions, to disbelieve even the evidence of his own eyes regarding the nature of the Island, and failing to have enough trust in his fellow castaway to actually let them in on what he was planning most of the time.

As Mandeville said, Jack was a fine field medic…and he could manage the occasional bit of stirring oratory…but that was about it. As a tactician and a strategist, he was mostly a dismal failure. He was also forcing a specific “fix” (off the Island at all costs) when he should have been adjusting to the realities of the situation.

Jack was wrong about the button in the Swan, wrong about the freighter, and flat-out denied the Island moved after having watched it do just that.

We’ll just have to see if Jack’s recent humblings at the hands of Locke, Ben, and Sawyer can actually turn the character around. I still don’t like Matt Fox, tho. He could be replaced with a display window mannequin and no one but the counters of Jackfaces would notice.

Chang in the new-recruit welcome video is wearing a Swan-logo lab coat at least as far back as when the Linuses arrived on the Island (so probably ’72-’74) and we see Radzinsky designing it in ’77.

In all fairness, I think the simplest explanation is a continuity blooper on the part of the writers, who wrote “The Man Behind the Curtain” 2 seasons ago and probably didn’t realize that the Swan was yet to be built in ’77.

When they had to build a new station for whatever as-yet-unknown purpose, they named it The Swan. The logo was pre-existing.

Thank You Doc!

Carnivale was actually quite an amazing series. Beautifully acted and shot with a very compelling and strange story line. It took me a few viewings of season 1 to really become a fan but once I did i fell hard for this show. It needed one more season to wrap things up completely, which was unfortunate.

Other than that, your recap was one of the better ones I have read for Namaste. The other would be Vozz, but of course we are still waiting for Luhks who is my favorite now that J. Wood is sick and might not do anymore reviews this season.