Lost Speculation Revisited

NOTICE: Contains spoilers from last night's season finale. Come back and read this later if you haven't see it yet. If you don't intend to watch it, then you can read or not, but mostly I would expect that you wouldn't want to.

After finishing watching season 4's finale last night, I decided to go back to the post I did before the season started, and see how I did on all this guesswork.

1. Richard -- I had decided this character was special in some way, due to his lack of aging over the decades. He is still an enigma, but we know he's more important now that this season is complete. He has been recruiting John Locke, basically since birth, and he definitely seems to be the non-figurehead leader. It's like the opposite of the Queen of England who's all for look and has little to no real power. I look for him to be very important as the last two seasons progress.

2. Mikhail -- After surviving the sonic fence and a gunshot in the back, it appeared Mikhail was invincible on the island. After his hand-grenade-in-the-underwater-station trick, though, he hasn't returned this season. Is it possible that being just off the coast of the island was enough to lose the island's protection, and he finally died? Or is he just lurking out of view for a season with a return to the show still in his future?

3. Ben -- I opined that Ben was a poser, and had never been special. However, now it seems likely that he was special at some point, and has since lost favor with the island for something. Perhaps it was as simple as the island getting John Locke, and therefore being done with Ben, or it might be that Ben did something to make the island mad, and he is now being punished. I may have to go dig for more details on this one to see what I may have missed on that front.

4. John -- He was, indeed, the man in the coffin. I was so excited when I saw that I'd gotten that right -- like maybe I've developed some kind of intuition on this story along the way. Regardless, now we have a new name for him -- Jeremy Bentham. This appears to be some sort of code name so that other people in the regular world don't get wind of the fact that this is another of the Oceanic survivors. We know he becomes the leader of the others in place of Ben, but we'll have to wait to see what made him leave the island to try to return the Oceanic 6 to the island.

5. Christian -- I had thought that maybe there was an alternate time stream where Jack's dad was still alive. That seems clear not to be the case. However, he'd had all these weird red-herring-style appearances before, and now he seems to be more and more of a player in this saga. And how is Claire now becoming a similar enigma to her dad. It makes me wonder if she died?

So, on these predictions, I turned out to be a big 2-3. Not so bad, but there are still so many questions remaining. For example:

We know there is a time differential, and not really a split. However, we we don't really know how that time differential plays into things, completely, so that will continue to be in the mix of stuff to be elaborated further.

We still don't know why Ben became the leader of the Others. His extinction of the Dharma Initiative folks was more of his proof that he was committed to the group, but it doesn't give us any idea as to why they gave him the chance. Just because his dead mama talked to him as a boy? That seems a stretch.

Are there any Dharma folks left? On this, I would say a hearty...well, mostly no. However, if Charlotte was actually born on the island, is that because she was part of the DI? Or did I misunderstand, and she's looking for some other mysterious place that she came from? Hard to say, but it's clear that will be more story, and she may be part of that Dharma thing.

That crazy specialness is also still a mystery. Now we have this idea that Hurley is "special", too, because he saw Jacob's cabin. That's certainly a different kind of special than I had identified at the beginning of the season, but maybe that's just because he didn't have a physical calamity to be healed from. Maybe the island made him mentally better, and that's why he's back in the institution after returning from the island.

Plus, the new characters are just questions for the future seasons. All very interesting, and keeping me ready for that next season, and wondering why I'll have to wait so long for that.