The season 2 finale is upon us, and with it some answers. Unfortunately, there are also some questions. But we’ll get to that. First, we have the boat that was found drifting at the end of Three Minutes. It turns out to be Desmond. He left a bit less than three weeks ago (seems odd, doesn’t it?) for a one-week sail to Fiji, and as luck would have it, he didn’t quite make it. So he’s back.
Sayid, Jin and Sun plan to sail his boat around the island to cut off The Others in a bit of a surprise attack, but as it turns out, that doesn’t quite work out just right. But I’ll get to that. First, the boat. It’s named Elizabeth, after the wife of a man who died before he could sail it. The woman? That’s Libby. It turns out she met Desmond in an airport and bought his coffee for him. Since he needed a boat and her husband had recently died before he could sail the boat, she decided her husband would like him to have it. So she gave it to him. Looks like Libby may have some bit parts to play. We still need to find out how she landed in the hospital with Hugo, after all.
Meanwhile, Desmond crashed on the island, where he met “Kelvin Inman” (Clancy Brown of Highlander, who incidentally played a character with the same last name but a different first name in the episode entitled One of Them earlier in Season 2, where he got Sayid to torture his boss). Kelvin showed Desmond the ropes of entering the code, how to initiate a lockdown, and also appears to be mostly responsible for painting the blast door map and was in possession of a key to shutdown the system. He also was secretly repairing Desmond’s ship, which he had told him had not been found.
At the same time, Michael was dragging Hurley, Jack, Kate and Sawyer across the island to the trap he has set, in order to get Walt back. Along the way they shoot and kill one of The Others, and Jack informs everyone else that Michael is up to something. Eko and Locke come to blows - literally - as Eko explodes dynamite in the hatch in an attempt to stop Locke from letting the countdown expire. And Desmond comes to realize that the experiment is not in the Swan but in the Pearl, as he reads the printouts brought back by Locke and finds that the plane came down as the timer expired the last time, meaning he brought down their plane (or at least that it happened at the same time).
About as this is happening, Hurley, Jack, Kate and Sawyer come across a large pile of tubes that came from a pneumatic system, simply piled in a field, which would seem to indicate that indeed The Pearl station was the experiment, since no one is reading the notes that are taken. And as the countdown reaches zero, Desmond frantically recovers his key and shuts down the system. As the episode ends, it would seem that Desmond, Eko and Locke may be gone.
Michael is told that he is free to leave with Walt, and if he takes a particular compass heading he will be rescued. Hurley is told to return to the beach and not try to come to The Others again. And Jack, Kate and Sawyer are captives. Sayid, Jin and Sun are at the wrong place, misdirected by Michael (though perhaps on their way to the right place). And two foreign speaking people in an outpost notice a magnetic anomaly. When they do, they notify a woman by phone.
The woman is Penny, who just happens to be the daughter of Charles Widmore. She’s also in love with (or used to be in love with) Desmond. Next season could be interesting.
