Yeah, that's why I called it "interesting". I didn't like it either and was trying to be nice.

I thought it was well done. Great twist at the end. Now we know why the "dead" characters kept having flashbacks!

I liked the way we saw the same scenes from other episodes, but from the perspective of people on the fringe. Funny that the two found the hatch earlier, and no wonder Paolo wanted to go to the Pearl!

I'll never believe that Sawyer would throw diamonds into a grave. He's still Sawyer, right? I'm almost annoyed that they had him do that.

I liked the episode even though it was basically self-contained and went nowhere. It was like the writers were saying "check us out, we're just f'n around this week" in a playful way, and I kind of enjoyed that. I liked all the references to things I'd forgotten from episodes past.

I suppose I was a bit set up for disappointment. In the same interview we heard earlier with the producers, they said that they knew people thought Nikki and Paolo were lame and out of left field, but to just hang in there because in a couple weeks their appearance was going to pay off and that the audience would understand them and they'd be just as integral as any of the other survivors.

Not so much, imo.

Don't know if this is where you were going with this, but this begs the question...would Locke's dad have been traveling under the name "Sawyer" because he is (or was posing as) THE Sawyer, the one that conned James' mom and inspired him to take the name?

Two things:

1) Now we know what Locke was watching when he got the visit from the son of the woman his "father" was going to con - it was Expose!

2) Did anyone else notice the smoke monster noise (mechanical clanking) just before the male spiders showed up?

Good episode, though I will miss the pretty that was Paulo.

Yup, that's what had both Nikki and Paolo on alert before they noticed the spiders. It would have been a good red herring for the audience had the male spider "twist" not been telegraphed 30 minutes before.

By the way, I don't see any reason to believe that it's not really Locke's father. His mom would have to be in on that, or somehow be mistaken about the paternity because when he came for the kidney, she was pretty insistent that he was indeed his father, even after he found out it was a con.

I put father in quotation marks because he was never a father to Locke in any way that counts, other than being a sperm donor.

I hated it. HATE IT! It wasn't the pay off we were promised for having to put up with their appearances earlier in the season. And though I don't mind them being bad, unlikable people, I DO mind them being completely boring people. And integrating them into the plane crash scene only felt like a bad rehash. Not to mention the utter pointlessness of including Boon and Shannon (bad wigs and all) unless we learned something more about them (i.e. revealed an additional connection they had to one of the Lost-ers).

Introducing guest appearances (like Arty in the first season) is a good thing to do. Introducing a separate plot arc involving new characters that NO one cares about is bad, IMO. You can do something new and clever with the existing folk without wasting anyone's time. My patience with the show was already thinning and this just made it worse. At this point, I think I'd be happier just watching Ben all the time. He's at least as interesting as he was when he first arrived on the show.

And I have a friend who liked it and was creeped out by how these two died but all I could think was, "Good riddance. You got the end you deserved, you morons."

And Sawyer would NOT have tossed the diamonds in the grave if he were written in character. If they'd showed, over time, that he was becoming resigned to never getting off the island, I could by it. But it just felt like forced contrition. Bah. BAH!

When it was first revealed that Locke's father is a con man, I assumed he'd turn out to be THE Sawyer. Not sure about all the plane manifest stuff, but I do think they'll turn out to be one and the same.