23 Questions About Lost Episode 607 'Dr. Linus', Answered!

Previously on Lost: Jack smashes some lighthouse mirrors because he's angry and confused. Smokey throws a massacre party, and everyone at the Temple is invited. Ben Linus is suddenly impotent in whatever cosmic game Jacob and Smokey are playing. Hurley makes a Star Wars reference, and then an Indiana Jones reference. And somewhere in a makeshift camp deep in the jungle, an abandoned skullbaby mewls for the insane momma who's left it to join the Crazy Army.

Now sling your rifle over your shoulder, push your filthy, but still jauntily styled, hair our of your face, and plunge onward into the island's thicket of secrets with us as we again attempt to answer 23 questions about last night's episode.

Is it sort of perfect that Ben--

Hey, that's "Dr. Linus" to you, bub!

--sorry, Dr. Linus is a high school history teacher in the flash-sideways?

It's nearly perfect. Unfortunately, most high school curricula don't include coursework in Homicidal Self-Preservation And Magical Island Management, which would be his ideal gig.

Where have I seen Principal Reynolds before? He looks awfully familiar.

Welcome ubiquitous 1980s scene-stealing superstar William Atherton -- Ghostbusters' own Walter "Yes, It's True, This Man Has No Dick" Peck, Die Hard's memorably prickish Richard Thornburg, and Real Genius' Professor Jerry "I Hate Popcorn!" Hathaway -- to Lost's final season.

Wasn't Ben's dad also in Real Genius? Should we read anything into that? Everything is so carefully orchestrated on this show!

Indeed, Jon "Roger Linus" Gries played reclusive, burnt-out, closet-dwelling genius Lazlo. If you must force some Lost connection on this bit of casting serendipity, the secret underground bunker that Lazlo lived in was similar to the Hatch, and if we really want to go crazy, maybe we can imagine that Lazlo, as a precocious youth, programmed the Dharma computer system into which the special string of numbers had to entered every 108 minutes, and that his realization about the part he unwittingly played in Jacob and Smokey's master plan drove him insane.

What year was Atherton inducted into the Eighties Movie Asshole Hall Of Fame?

In 1992, he and William Zabka were both first ballot inductees. It was a moving ceremony; legs were swept.

Nostalgia is great, but we're getting off track here. What was in the satchel that Miles gave to Ilana after she asked him how Jacob died?

They want us to believe it contains Jacob's cremains, retrieved from the fire pit into which his freshly murdered body was kicked. But it's actually full of pharmaceutical-grade marijuana that Jacob had been holding for Ilana. Good sh*t is really hard to come by on the island (when it did become available, Sawyer would always wind up stealing the stash), so this bequest to his loyal protector was significant.

So Alex is Ben's student in the flash-sideways, and not his (adoptive) daughter?

Correct. Though she is still, perhaps curiously, a Rousseau.

If she's still a Rousseau, shouldn't she be living in France with her French mom?

In the flash-sideways, Danielle Rousseau, no longer a scientist, moved to Los Angeles to open an upscale, very successful brasserie. But she still sends Alex to an under-funded public school, for some reason.

What's the book that Ben ignores in the "library" tent in the ransacked beach camp?

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. Because many of them have been "chosen" to be "candidates," get it?

In that same scene, is there any significance to Ben's lingering over the porno mag Booty Babes, or its tagline, "Big Beautiful Bouncy Buns"?

Ben's interest in the magazine might indicate that he's an ass man, a fact that could become important later in the season. But the magazine's primary purpose was to serve as a naughty "easter egg" to hardcore Lost fans, as the featured booty on its cover actually belongs to e3xecutive producer Carlton Cuse.

How come Oceanic Airlines doesn't have some sort of system for tracking down pilots who are running late for work because they overslept?

Because they know that even when guys like Frank Lapidus oversleep, Fate will somehow rectify their work schedules in such a way that they will eventually reach their intended destinations on mysterious, uncharted islands.

Is Frank "claimed"? He's got a serious case of Claire-style "Island Head."

No. He's just not a vain dude.

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