Season Six of Lost has been calling back to Season One quite a bit. I’d try to start some in-depth analysis regarding symmetry, coming full circle, and duality, but really, the show’s got enough symbolism going on as-is, and it hardly needs me to add to it.

This week, we focus on Jack, the man who has had more daddy issues than anyone on a show that’s already full of people with daddy issues. In the newly-created timeline, the big bombshell is that Jack is the father this time around (though he still has daddy issues of his own, of course; he’d hardly be Jack without them).  The question remains as to who the mother is; it’s doubtful that it’s Sarah, though, since she and Jack didn’t originally meet until only three years before the fateful 815 flight.  It’s doubtful that the mother’s identity is immaterial, though, especially since this is Lost and all.  (Part of me is holding out hope that his mother might be Juliet.)

Tiny, subtle hints are being dropped about possible connections and/or relationships between the two timelines.  The bit with Jack not remembering his appendectomy, for instance, suggests a possible lack of familiarity with the new reality.  Or maybe it’s just a colossal misdirection.

Back in the original timeline, it seems like everyone’s doing their best to leave the Temple, the one place that has been repeatedly referred to as the only safe place on the Island.  Not that the word of the Others is necessarily trustworthy, and with the Man in Black presumably on his way there (along with Claire, the apparent Robin to his Batman), such safety may turn out to be a total lie, anyway.  The only main characters still even at the Temple right now are Miles and Sayid.  Dogen probably has some tricks up his sleeve, I’m sure, but with two gun-toting crazies on their way, I’m preemptively calling it that Lennon takes a bullet to the chest.

Hurley gets another visit from Jacob, and takes slight nudgings and turns them into total badassery.  He even gets to stare down Dogen and tell him off with regard to his candidacy (to which Dogen replies, in muttered Japanese, “Bitch, you’re lucky, because otherwise I’d cut you.”*)  The whole thing ends up possibly just being a test within a test, but it still sets up Hurley for major hero potential down the line.  And hey, the episode’s titular lighthouse is pretty freaky-cool, containing more leads to Jacob’s names and numbers and whatnot.

Emilie de Ravin, it turns out, does a great job of playing psychologically detached and crazy.  Her “Jungle Claire” is a lovely mixture of subtle and chilling, with that one part Nice to five parts Menacing that she manages to pull off.  She’s very much inherited the mantle of Rousseau: the wacko castaway jungle-chick who’s obsessed with finding her kidnapped child.  Again, parallels that I’m sure are not accidental in the least.  But hey, at least Rousseau never had a dead animal surrogate for her baby.  That we saw, at any rate.

Another narrow-focus episode this time around, which again is a good thing. We do get just a brief glimpse of the Man in Black, as well as a brief bit of Kate, who seems to have mellowed out dramatically, for the better. And heck, we even get a, “Hey, remember Shannon?  She used to be on the show!”

Also towards the end, there’s a brief stop at the old caves and a look at the two skeletons therein.  The ones that once made us think, all those years ago, “Hey, I wonder if this is some time travel shit going on?” Oh, how naive we were. Only not.

* This is a fairly accurate translation, actually. Well, okay, so what Dogen said was technically more polite. The intent is there, though.