Confirmed Dead SE4, EP2

“I’m Daniel Faraday. I’m here to rescue you.”

Nice Star Wars reference.

Ok so one mystery solved: It doesn’t matter who Naomi’s sister is. It was a code for “I’m being held at gunpoint.”

At the end of the show we see Naomi speaking with Mr. Abbadan about the mission. Naomi tells him these are the wrong people for a job like this: A headcase, a ghostbuster, an anthropologist and a drunk. They are inexperienced in field work and should not be going into the field without armed support. Abbadan tells Naomi, that’s why your going in. “Everything relies on YOU getting them in, getting them out and preventing them from getting killed. Think you can you handle that?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Let’s meet the Wrong Team.

The Headcase
We first see Daniel Faraday is sitting at his home with a faceless woman making him breakfast when the news of the discovery of Flight 815 in the trench of Sunda in the Indian Ocean comes on TV. A boat, named, coincidentally, The Christiana, has been trolling for shipwrecks and comes across the wreckage. Daniel, watching the footage, bursts into tears. “Why are you upset?” his companion asks. Daniel answers, “I don’t know.”

The Ghostbuster
Miles Strom is part medium, part con man. We first meet him when he pulls up in front of a house in Inglewood, California and he’slistening to a radio broadcast of the 815 recovery. He’s also a dustbuster ghostbuster, because he brings some kind of a handheld vacuum with him the “exorcise” Mrs. Gardner’s house in of her murdered grandson.

Now if I can digress for a short moment, I saw the pictures on the wall of Gardner’s wall looked suspiciously like a young Mr. Eko. Not living in a household with the benefit of DVR, I did not get a clear shot. But something to think about.

Anyhow, Miles charges the poor woman double since he’s there to take care of a murder victim. When the ghost tells him where he stashed his drugs and his cash, Miles pockets them and turns off the dustbuster. Then, because he’s such a great guy, he gives Mrs. Gardner half off his originally doubled price.

The Anthropologist
We first meet Charlotte Staples Lewis Medenina Tunisia on the site of an archeological dig. She sees a newspaper announcing the discovery of the wreckage of Flight 815. “how many different languages do you have to read that in until you believe it’s true?” her companion asks. “How many languages are there?” Charlotte answers. She is at first banned from entering the desert site, but ignores the protests of the locals barring her and walks in. There is a partially unearthed skeleton of a polar bear. Charlotte digs a little further to discover a collar with the Dharma Hydra logo on it.

The Drunk
Frank Lapidus is sitting in his dive shop in Eleuthera, Bahamas watching the footage of the Flight 815 recovery mission and dropping a little metal airplane replica, just like Kates, into an aquarium. All 324 on board are confirmed dead. A picture appears on the screen of the pilot, Seth Norris. Frank freaks and calls the 815 identification line. “That is not Seth Norris. Seth Norris would have worn his wedding ring.” Turns out, Frank and Seth worked together, because Frank was the one who was supposed to pilot 815 that day.

The Wrong Team lands on the Island
Kate and Jack meet up with Daniel, who calls to the boat and speaks to George, who tells him, “Take me off speaker, Daniel.” Daniel is carrying a gun which makes both Jack and Kate nervous. Daniel finishes his call and says they need to search for the rest of his team, which he can easily track through the aid of his sat phone and the GPS. As they are searching for Miles they come across a chest full of equipment, among which is a gas mask. OK, so now Jack and Kate are REALLY suspicious. “What are you doing here?” Jack asks. “Well, “ hedges Daniel, “Resucing you people…? I can’t really say that’s our primary objective..” And, of course, before Daniel can elaborate, the GPS starts blinging and they’ve got Miles on the scope.

They track down Miles, who is not quite as friendly or loopy as Daniel. Miles is pissed off the moment he sees Jack. He suspects that Jack and Kate killed Naomi since she used the “sister” code phrase. Kate, after spending more than three months on the island with Locke and two seconds in the presence of Miles, spills that it was Locke who killed Naomi. Miles says, well, we’ll just see about that. Take me to her body. I’ll be able to tell if you’re telling the truth. And sho’nuff, Miles hunches over her and and psychically reads what has happened to her. Daniel makes some wacked out comment about how the light on the island doesn’t diffuse quite right which Kate takes as an opening to try and talk Danile down from the ledge and let them know that she and Jack don’t need to be held a t gunpoint. Jack who has already figured out that Sayid and Juliet have them covererd tells Kate she’s wasting her breath and to just let things play out. Now the pre-Juliet Kate would have caught Jack’s fairly obvious signal to her, but her and Jack are disconnected right now, so Kate remains clueless until the trap springs.

As much as I’m am annoyed with Jack right now, I must say it was quite satisfying when Sayid and Juliet ambushed the hotheaded Miles and Kate and Jack disarmed him easily. For the first three season, it seems as if out Lostaways are the ones who are always at a loss for their lack of experience. IT’s nice to see the home team take advantage for once.

Meanwhile on the other side of the island, Charlotte is hanging upside down over a large pool of water. She releases her shute, lands in the water and surfaces to find herself face to face with the Lockies, who are not quite as glad to see her as she thinks they should be. She gives them her rescue story, thinking that they will just sit tight and wait for the resuce team to track them. Boy, isn’t she surprised when Locke turns the tables on her and says, Sorry Charlotte, you’re coming with us.

Which brings us back to the Jackies, who are continuing to use the GPS to find the other members of the Wrong Team. Suddenly, the GPS starts beeping frantically’She’s running!” Then, crashing through the jungle comes Vincent with the GPS locator tied around his neck.

Frank sets off a flare which causes the Jackies to track him down. Frank is apparently a better pilot that the other three team members have been led to believe since they all jumped well before he had a chance to make a beautiful three point landing.

Miles phones the freighter and wants to talk to Mitkowski, but Mitkowski can’t come to the phone right now.

Juliet tends to Frank’s wounds and they start a little chit chat. He asks Juliet her name, which she foolishly gives him. “A native?” The jig is up: “Miles! This is Juliet. She was not on the plane.”

Now Miles freaks out and tells them why the Wrong Team is here: They’re here for Benjamin Linus and shows a picture proving that at some point during his life, Ben has left the island, since in the picture he is clearly sporting two pieces of a snazzy looking three piece suit circa 1983.

The Journey of the Lockies
Locke’s band of merry folk are traipsing through the jungle when Lock changes direction. When Sawyer questions him about why they are headed east, Locke says that they have to go to the cabin. “Cabin’s back there, dude.” Hurley offers, which startles both Ben, in an alarmed way and Locke in a pleasantly surprised way. As the journey continues, and Sawyer continues to harass Locke about his motives, “Where you takin’ your orders from, Colonel Kurtz?” (which I believe was Locke’s “handle” back in his wheelchair bound gaming days at the box company).

To Sawyer’s very great surprise, Locke answer “A tall Walt.” Which means we’ll probably be seeing more of Walt this season, since Locke has already acknowledged that Walt has grown. Think time travel, ala fossilized polar bear in the desert with the Dharma collar. Skeptical Sawyer keeps on about Ben, who has neatly stepped into Charlies shoes as official annoyer of the island—(except Ben doesn’t annoy the audience--at least he doesn’t annoy me.) Sawyer wants to know why Locke didn’t ask any follow up questions and Locke proceeds to announce, quite casually, that Ben had shot him and left him for dead and Walt saved his life. Walt told him that he had to stop Naomi and her people from coming to the island. When Sawyer doubts that Locke was shot, Locke lifts up his shirt and shows the entry and exit wounds, then sweet confirmation: “If I’d have had a kidney there, I’d probably be dead.”

For the second episode this season, Ben is trying to tell Alex something, but doesn’t get to. When Sawyer steps between Carl and Ben, Ben then turns his serpent’s tongue on Sawyer, reminding him that he was nothing more than a two-bit con man in the real world and that he wouldn’t stand a chance with Kate next to a world class surgeon like Jack. “I think she was really upset when you decided to come with us, James. Good thing Jack is there to comfort her.” You know, I’m starting to think that Ben actuals enjoys being beaten up.

Locke calls off Sawyer saying that they need Ben because he’s been on the island longer than anyone else and he has information they need and besides, apart from his mouth, Ben is harmless. “Oh yeah, His mouth put that hole in your gut?” So Locke calls Sawyer’s bluff and tells him that they should execute him right in front of his daughter, which elicits an unexpectedly emotional response from Alex who has been hating her dad for quite some time now.

So Charlotte tries to convince the Lockies that she;s there to resuce them. Locke says she’s not who she says she is and whatever they’re here for, it isn’t them. “Sure.” Sawyer answers in the best line of the night, “Who are we to argue with taller ghost Walt?” Things start to get heated when Ben pulls a gun and shoots Charlote—who doesn’t die because she’s wearing a bullet-proof vest.

After Ben shoots Charlotte, even Locke is fed up with his shenanigans. Locke’s ready to kill him when Ben, once again, pulls the information ace out of the hole. Locke starts asking questions about the monster, which Ben cannot answer. That’s not the information he has, or is prepared to share at this time, even with a gun in his face. “These people are a threat, John, and if you kill me you’ll never know what a threat they are.” Ben then proceeds to recite Charlotte’s dossier and that of her teammates as we see shots of awe, confusion and shock on everyone’s face. “I know why they’re here. I know what they want.” Ben says. “And what is that?” asks skeptical Sawyer.

“Me, James. They want me.”

Locke then asks the question on everyone’s mind: “How do you know all this?”

“Because I have a man on their boat.” Boom. The end.

Notes on the WMMR Lost Talk this morning
I’m usually able to glean a lot from the P & S wrap up, but this morning’s offered nothing new except the theory that perhaps Ben’s man on the boat is Michael. Everybody on the show was clearly puzzled by the logo on the bear collar when it was clearly the hydra. But by far the most annoying call was the guy who called in and said that the Oceanic airplane got to the bottom of the sea because Ben ordered it there and he remembers it in the episode last year when Juliet goes to Mikhail’s with Ben to see her sister on TV. He was dead wrong, everybody THOUGHT it, but the only one who really said it was Preston and even after that, the guy kept insisting that it happened.

How the plane got there and other theories
Clearly there is some sort of cover up involving Fight 815, because the plane is obviously in one piece at the bottom of the Sunda Trench, but it is also in two or more pieces on the island. I think the people working for Abbadan set up the plane on the bottom of the ocean in order to look for the real 815. They all suspected it went down on the island and I think the EMP that made them visible in season two was what triggered this series of events. Come to think of it, if light is somehow "bending" around the island, that would kind of explain why the sky turned purple when the EMP was released (see more on this below). I think that electro magnetic properties of the island were harnessed (perhaps foolishly) by the hippies of the Dharma initiative to be studied and thus necessitated the pushing of the button. Now that the EMP has "broken" the “harness”, the electromagnetic properties can just exist in a natural state. I don't think Ben knew that releasing that pulse by not pressing the button would make them visible to the outside, because back when he was still Henry, he told Locke that the button was a joke.

I think perhaps Ben may be the mysterious Alvar Hanso

Fountain of Youth, Theory of Relativity and Teletransportation for Dummies
I think that time is measured differently on the island. I floated this theory a last year about the Fountain of Youth and how apparently Richard Eyeliner has not aged a day since young Ben showed up and then subsequently grew up on the island. Also, remember Mr. Eyeliner showing Juliet MRI's of a womb and Juliet thinking it was a 70 year old woman and Eyeliner telling her she was much younger. Time moves slower on island and faster in the real world—which would explain Walt's aging if he in fact got off the island, then came back.

There was some theory of Einstein's (perhaps part of relativity—bear with me here since physics is not my strong suit ).that talked of people not aging if they were traveling at the speed of light. I think the teleporting falls in there somewhere as well—not so much as a teleporting machine, but a natural phenomena such as a worm hole or something. However there is some kind of "will" influencing it, such as Jacob's, which is what Ben called "the magic box". In the season 3 DVD special features, there was an orientation film for the Orchid Station, in which Bunny #8 suddenly appears in two places at once.

Charlotte not only looked pleased to find the Dharma collar, but she looked like she found exactly what she expected.

Sig tells me he took a class in Penn State in aerospace engineering where they studied a guy named Michael Faraday. According to Sig (and reiterated on the P&S Show this morning): “Michael Faraday created a force field that traps in and blocks out electrical waves, radiation radio waves. It's called a Faraday Cage. Interesting how the whole island was sort of a Faraday Cage.”
Also interesting is that Daniel’s last name is Faraday and he is also a physicist, although one who doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed a physicist.

Furthermore, also thanks to Sig, there is another one of Einstein’s theory called Unified Field Theory. Sig says, “This was part of the basis for the conspiracy theory around The Philadelphia Experiment, where … you could bend light around an object to make it appear invisible using electromagnetic fields, gravity and radiation and something like that. Well, as the story goes, the test warship did not appear invisible, but it supposedly teleported from Norfolk
to Philadelphia.”

Daniel Faraday makes a queer comment about the quality of the light on the island? "The light doesn't seem to scatter properly here." Which ties right back to my the-sky-turns-purple-when-the –EMP-pulse-is-released-and-the-island-becomes-visible-because-light-is-longer-bending-around-it theory.

Did you catch the name of the search vessel that found Oceanic 815? "The Christiana".

Lockies:
Hurley
Ben
Sawyer
Claire and the Baybay
Carl
Alex
Rousseau

Jackies:
Kate
Juliet
Sayid
Desmond
Rose
Bernard

Next week
Another member of the Oceanic Six is revealed. Peace out. My fingers are GONE and, as my daughter would say, this is a little over the top.