“The Other Woman” (or as I like to call it, the worst episode of Lost season 4 so far) answered a few questions while, for the most part, not raising too many others. For this, it should be celebrated. However, it also followed the soap opera that is the romantic entanglements of the major players, which is not the reason most people love Lost.

I get that there are Jaters and Skaters and maybe Jackiets (is that the right term?), but with so many mysteries surrounding the island, the love lives of these people seems trivial. What's more, “The Other Woman” committed a serious faux pas in my book by turning Ben (Michael Emerson) into a petulant child.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps we will learn there's more to the Ben/Juliet dynamic than just his possessive love because she reminds him of "her" (aka, Ben's childhood Dharma gal pal Annie, we assume).  But really, that's not the Ben we've grown to know and love. The Ben I know doesn't get bogged down or distracted by petty romantic squabbles, he doesn't let his emotions play any role in his decisions. Ben is a cold, calculating dictator whose motivations are purely about self preservation (I'm willing to extend that to the preservation of the island, which he likely views as an extension of himself).

Yes, we learned all about a new Dharma station with a toxic gas that is clearly the same stuff Ben used at the behest of the Hostiles to help kill the Dharma Initiative. And yes, we learned that Charles Widmore is, more likely than not, the Economist, Ben's rival. And, based on Ben's conversation with Locke and the previews for next week's episode, we can be 99.9 percent certain that Ben's spy on the boat is exactly who we've thought it was all along.


Speaking if Charles Widmore's involvement, knowing that the freighter is his, things are beginning to click, such as the map Daniel Faraday used to find The Tempest that you can see above. You may have wondered where he got that map from. Well, we just saw Charles Widmore purchase the Black Rock journal at auction, and since it crashed on the island, it would make sense that the captain, Magnus Hanso, would draw maps of the island in his journal, and that is what Charles Widmore used to track down the island. This is just one of many things in this episode that makes sense once you tie it in to the things we've seen previously this season.


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-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
Source: Lostpedia
(Images courtesy of ABC and Lostpedia)