We're three episodes into the new series and more questions have been raised than answered. Of course, I didn't expect anything less.
Casshern: The "monster" was, indeed, shown at the end of last season. What, exactly, it is is still up in the air since, as Locke put it, it was a "column of black smoke." And glad to see that you LIKE something.
I was not a big fan of this week's episode. It didn't give me a damn thing. We've seen the Locke vs. Jack/Faith vs. Science fight before. And the Locke flashbacks only revealed that the woman, whom he was pretending the phonesex woman was, was real.
She asks him to take a leap of faith, but he already did. In the Boone-gets-dead episode, Locke's dad and the island are analgous, as are his misplaced faith and sacrifices to both of them.
The only thing I find interesting about it at all is that Locke is full of faith but still driven with a need to understand while Jack is lacking in faith yet takes a lot of things on first glance.
And we may have gotten a small hint about what happened to Jack's wife/marriage. Personally, I thought that his reaction to Desmond's questioning betrayed that she had died...but my friend pointed out that his reaction wasn't about his wife at all...it was that Desmond's questions were PROOF that nothing makes sense about the island at all...and Jack has been fighting that since day one.
As for the training film: Yes, vague. But we now know there are/were 5 other stations on the island. And that, at some point, it was a findable place.
I just hope this isn't the start of the show getting overly sciencey. I mean, how the polar bear got there was a great mystery. To explain that it was part of a research experiment is kind of lame. I hope the addition of science doesn't ruin the mystical sense of the show.