23 Questions About Lost Episode 611, "Happily Ever After," Answered!

Previously on Lost: Desmond participates in Charles Widmore's race around the world, unsuccessfully. Desmond turns a key that causes all sorts of bad electromagnetic-related things to happen. Desmond sees flashes of the future. Desmond shouts "PEN-NAY!" to the skies, the powerful sound of his love dissipating in the island air before reaching the heavens. Desmond is locked behind a door on a submarine. Widmore dives in and out of mountainous piles of gold, Scrooge McDuck-style. Juliet whispers, "It worked," with her dying breath after detonating a bomb named after an Archie Comics character. Hurley eyes a box of Dharma Ding Dongs with lust in his eyes.

Please join us as we wake from a fevered, restless sleep and scribble some advanced mathematical equations which, when solved, provide the Answers to the Questions raised by this week's episode of everyone's favorite time-travel soap opera:

Can we get a quick CorkCheck before we get started?

The cork is: in the bottle. At least on the island. In the flash-sideways, it's possible that the cork is out of the bottle, unleashing an evil that's keeping our favorite characters from lives filled with copious love-making with their soulmates. (Regardless of cork status, Sawyer is still getting plenty of ass in his new buddy-cop reality. He seems OK with this arrangement, even if Charlotte won't take him back for another sexual sting operation.)

Wait a minute. Are you saying that the flash-sideways is actually a loveless Hell unleashed by Smokey's possible uncorking? Isn't the island Hell, according to Richard/Ricardo/Richardus?

We don't know what the flash-sideways is! Although now it seems to be a place where some people are slowly becoming aware that they've been in love with a Special Person in another time, in another place. And Richard just said that "we're all in hell on this island" business because Ben got all stabby with his god/bff, which understandably made him a little upset. Cut the guy some slack, he's an immortal without a bestie with whom to wile away eternity.

Can a simple, standard-issue hospital IV pole be used as a weapon?

Indeed, it can. Though if you're going to use it to, say, attack a shady billionaire industrialist who's plucked your from your happy life to return you to the mysterious island from which you finally escaped, you should probably try to swing it in such a way that the IV bag (filled with morphine or some other unpleasant medicinal fluid) smashes open on your target's face upon impact, stunning him long enough for you to escape. Otherwise you're just swinging a skinny metal pole, and your results may vary.

Will that ancient generator that probably hasn't been fired up in decades be ready to conduct a rushed test of incredibly powerful electromagnetic forces inside a box with nothing but two giant coils and a chair in it?

There's only one way to find out: Take a day-player, lock him inside that Ronco Showtime Electromagnetic Rotisserie Oven, and see how long it takes for the poor sucker to fry. Answer: set it, forget it, and just a few seconds later, he's cooked to a delicious, smoldering black crisp!

Naming the sacrificial, magnet-testing rabbit "Angstrom": clever or too on-the-nose?

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse never met a middlebrow literary reference they could resist. But we'll rule on the side of clever, as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom character also traveled through time in hopes of being reunited with his true love.

What will happen to Desmond if he doesn't sit inside the magnetic death-box that nuked Widmore's unfortunate red-shirt?

If you believe Widmore, everyone will die, and everything that Desmond's ever cared about will be gone forever. But it doesn't matter, because he's going to lock Desmond inside the box whether he's willing to potentially sacrifice himself or not. Hume is, after all, the only person who's survived a catastrophic electromagnetic event.

Is flash-sideways, preggers Claire's baby going to be a boy or a girl?

Desmond bets it's a boy. But he's probably cheating by using his future-seeing powers to make that guess.

Why is George the Driver so eager to get Desmond laid?

He's just doing what any good flunky would do while entertaining someone "important," but mostly he's thrilled he's not bleeding to death from a fatal bout of the Time Travel Plague on a suicide-barge loaded up with explosives. (His solicitous driver character is obviously an homage to the late, great Bruno Kirby's work as the motormouth chauffeur in This Is Spinal Tap.)

Now that we've brought up Fisher Stevens, is it time for the obligatory Short Circuit joke?

No way. That dude has an Oscar now. He's earned a reprieve from cheap Johnny Five gags.

If Daniel Faraday Widmore, now Charles' son in the flash-sideways, is such a genius musical visionary, why does he think combining classical music with rock is such an original idea in 2004?

One of the unexpected consequences of Jughead's detonation forever altered the musical landscape; for example, prog-rock never evolved in this reality, neoclassical-hair-metal shredder Yngwie Malmsteen went to Swedish medical school instead of picking up a Stratocaster, and Metallica opted to perform with a 40-piece polka band instead of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra back in 1999. Rock history's a fragile thing once you start playing around with time travel.

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