23 Questions About Lost Episode 608, 'Recon,' Answered!

Previously on Lost: Sawyer's girlfriend falls down a pit with an atomic bomb, but doesn't die. Then she hits the bomb with a rock. It explodes. She dies! (We think?) The world is split into two timelines. (We think? It could secretly be just one.) Sawyer is sad because his ladyfriend is dead. He buys her an engagement ring, then throws it in the ocean because he's still sad about her being dead. Sawyer listens to Iggy Pop records. A Smoke Monster who looks a lot like John Locke kills everybody at the Temple. Kate runs from people who are trying to arrest her. Charlie tries to kill himself in an airplane bathroom. Hurley says, "Dude," meaningfully. And then says it again, with an entirely different, and even more meaningful, inflection. An unnerving horn noise blares before a cut to black.

Climb into our submarine and get ready to surface on the beach of television's most baffling island, where we'll disembark, armed with machine guns loaded with Answers, ready to slaughter all the unlucky Questions we come upon in this week's episode.

At the beginning of this episode, when Sawyer enters the garbage hut to wake a slumbering Jin, did it seem like, even just for a fleeting second, that Sawyer was waking him in that tender, "Hey, sleepyhead, I got us some bagels!" way that two people who have fallen in bed together out of circumstance often share?

Not really. But as it turns out, perhaps in a bit of playful foreshadowing, that Jin is one of the precious few characters that Sawyer did not conquer sexually this week. Also, he doesn't seem the bagel-fetching type. You bring the bagels to him.

So in the flash-sideways, Sawyer's a cop. And Miles is his partner?

The flash-sideways (or the "flash-copways," if you will) is a funny place like that. Where Sawyer was once a conman, he is now a lawman. We would not be entirely surprised to later be treated to a scene in which Jacob is the person presenting young James with his police academy diploma. Or maybe Detective Ford became a cop precisely because Jacob was not there to touch him at his graduation.

We're not necessarily conversant on the rules of law-enforcement ethics and entrapment, but doesn't it seem questionable -- at best! -- to have sex with the suspect you're setting up for a police raid?

As we've seen so many times before, the "rules" are a tricky thing in the flash-sideways. Loan sharks continuing collecting long after debts are repaid. People engaging in blackmail aren't allowed to make too many demands, even if their extortion material is pretty damaging. And so maybe this kind of sexual entrapment is permissible in this alternate reality. It should certainly make for more interesting police work, at the very least.

Besides Miles and Sawyer, what other Losties would make fun buddy cop show pairings?

*Hurley and Jack (they're already working towards it on the island; one's super-mellow, the other's super-uptight!)

*Ben and Locke (there are rumblings about a spinoff)

*Aaron, Walt and the Skullbaby

*Kate and Juliet, in a kind of sexier Cagney and Lacey situation

*The Polar Bear and the Smoke Monster (more of a Syfy network kind of thing)

*Charlie and a Giant Bag of Heroin (delicious tension each week as Charlie struggles not to get entangled in a relationship with his partner)

Why is Miles so determined to set up Sawyer with his archaeologist friend, so much so that he asks him if he "wants to die alone," which is a weird thing to say to a dude?

This is what buddies/partners do for each other. And then they get together in the locker room the next day to talk about their conquests, with the one who's in a relationship (Miles, who's dating a ghost) pressing the insatiable stud (Sawyer) for details of the wild, no-strings-attached sex life he wishes he had. Have you never seen a cop show?

Also, they needed a way to get Charlotte back onto the show.

But what would they have in common?

They have sex in common. And it's a powerful interest, as they were doing it within seconds of meeting. More importantly, as an "archaeologist," Charlotte has a powerful intellectual need to go digging through the artifacts in Sawyer's underwear drawer in search of clues about his past.

Why does Sawyer freak out when he catches her in the middle of her "excavation"?

Because she unearthed his Murder-Suicide Trapper Keeper, which he uses to neatly organize all the stray pieces of paper relating to his father's killing of his mother, and then himself. Never mess with a guy's morbid clip collection, especially if it contains clues about his search for the conman who precipitated his parents' demise. Seems obvious.

When Sawyer comes across Kate's old dress in the polar bear cage on Hydra Island (we're back in the 2007 timeline, stay with us), what was he thinking about?

He was clearly thinking about the crazy polar-bear-cage sex they had a few seasons back. You never really get over your first cage-based sexual encounter, especially if it happened while you were waiting for some mysterious men to execute you. This episode was absolutely drenched in sweaty Sawyersex.

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