Lost Season 4: "The Beginning of the End"

*Warning: I wouldn't read this if you haven't seen the first episode of Lost: Season 4.*

Tupac is alive! He moved to the island!

Jack's father is ALIVE!

Tonight's episode can be summarized in three words: Whoa, leigh, and sheet. Nine months of waiting was worth it... Lost did not disappoint.

Basically, we got one big answer in the form of white tennis shoes: Jack's father is Jacob!

How do I know this? This fall, Verizon Wireless and ABC released 13 "mobisodes," called "Missing Pieces," that fill in backstory to the Lost mythology. The 13th and final mobisode has Vincent walking through the weeds when a man whistles for him to come over... a man very clearly wearing white tennis shoes. And it's Jack's father, Christian Shepard, starting the whole show by telling Vincent to go wake up Jack because "he has work to do."

I don't have a screen capture to prove it, but when Hurley stumbled upon Jacob's cabin in tonight's episode, the man sitting in the chair is clearing wearing white tennis shoes.

I don't really know why Jack's father would be Jacob. And maybe he's not actually Jacob, but a manifestation similar to the smoke monster. Come to think of it, maybe the smoke monster itself is Jacob. In other words, Jacob is a real entity but can only exist as Jacob in the cabin itself, and when he tries to leave he turns into the smoke monster. (I use the term smoke monster kind of liberally... he's probably not an actual monster made of smoke, it's just what people call it because, after all, who knows what the hell it is?)

So, if that's the case, and it wanted to start off this journey by becoming Jack's dad and waking him up to complete his "work," that would mean he's guiding everybody he's appeared to down a certain path. Jack as his father, Eko as his brother, Kate as the horse, Hurley as Dave, etc. Going further with this, after they get off the island, could the smoke monster have somehow followed them? When Hurley's at the mental institution and Charlie appears, one of the other inmates says "somebody is watching you." Either Hurley is nuts and imagined that guy telling him that, or, that was a clue and the guy actuallysaw Charlie, which would mean he's a physical entity of some sort. (Or, you have to be crazy to see the entity). And maybe he/it's still appearing because it wants them back on the island to finish whatever they started... which is why they all seem to want to go back.

However, one clue that I'm sure exists is the fact that Hurley heard "the whispers" when he found Jacob's cabin. We still haven't really found out what the whispers are, or why they are so mysterious and say things backward and such. The fact that they appeared just as Hurley found the cabin seem to mean Jacob has something to do with them, so I'm going to say that the whispers are Jacob (whatever he or it is) trying to communicate.

At this point, Locke has the answers. He was in the cabin with the man with the white tennis shoes. So we'll have to ask him.

The second big part of tonight's episode was the flash-forward to the events in the future. These clearly took place before Jack's plea to Kate in the last one (as evidenced by Jack telling Hurley he's thinking about growing a beard), and it looks like Hurley was the first one to start wondering if leaving the island was the right decision.

More importantly, I think, is the overall theme of those flash-forwards, and what will probably become to central mystery of the season: what exactly are the Oceanic 6 lying about?

In last season's ender, Jack said to Kate that he's "sick of lying." In tonight's episode, Hurley asked him at the end if he was worried he'd go crazy and tell the truth. Earlier, when he was being questioned at the police station, Hurley claimed he didn't know Ana Lucia. And then there was the mysterious "attorney" for Oceanic Airlines that asked Hurley "are they still alive?"

If only six people made it off the island (what else could Oceanic 6 mean?), maybe they lied about the rest? Lied about what, I don't know. Maybe something major happens that we haven't seen yet. Maybe Oceanic Air and the Hanso Foundation paid them off to keep quiet about the Dharma Initiative. Either way, they seem to have made them celebrities of some kind, Jack going as far as saying he's signing autographs and being a hero.

So... why do they want to go back? I'm thinking it could be something sci-fi, something all conspiracy-theory-like, but really, it could be something a lot simpler. I mean, if you were suddenly stranded on a tropical island nobody from the real world knew about or could find, and you had friends, food, water, mysteries, love, etc... would you honestly want to go back to your normal life with all the disappointment and responsibility?