‘Lost’: So Who Was That Dead Man?

Note: This is a recap of Lost’s third-season finale. For Vulture’s updated coverage of Lost, including the season four finale, click here.
Related: Nussbaum: Why ‘Lost’ Is the Best Game Show in TV History

Wow. Last night’s episode of Lost was possibly the best ever: Charlie drowned, Locke lived, a bunch of Others were blown up in a plan that we were certain was doomed to fail, Naomi turned out to be a liar (we think), Juliet turned out not to be a liar (we think), Sayid broke a guy’s neck with his ankles, Walt hit puberty, the awful episode about the VW bus was (barely) redeemed, and, um, in the future Kate and Jack ARE NOT ON THE ISLAND! What else can we say, except:

Question #1: Why isn’t Future Kate in jail? Obviously, whoever rescued the 815 survivors has either granted her some kind of immunity or else changed the past. That Jack refers to his dead father as being alive indicates the latter. Then again, that was probably the pills talking. Whatever is going on, both Kate and Jack are entirely different people (he’s a bearded drunk, she’s a feist-less cover girl). As for the rest of the crew — are they dead, like Ben predicted? Or did they stay behind?

Question #2: Who is Naomi working for? The obvious answer would be the Widmore Corporation (but for Penny’s dad and not Penny). Ben is bad, that much we know. But is Widmore — which is somehow connected to the Hanso Corporation, which is behind the Dharma Initiative — worse? Since the future sucks so much, it would seem Ben was telling the truth, if only about the danger that Naomi represented.

Question #3: Who is in the coffin? Everyone is abuzz about this one, and, frankly, we wonder if the writers even have an answer for us yet. Thanks to some sleuthing fans who freeze-framed and magnified a shot of the obit, we know the corpse’s name is Jeremy Bentham and that he is from New York. Apparently, Bentham’s also the name of an English philosopher from the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century who evaluated actions based upon their consequences. (Okay, we looked it up.) Since John Locke is also a philosopher’s name, could Jeremy Bentham be Locke’s new identity? Also, if Locke is the dead man, that would explain why Jack refers to him as neither friend nor relative. But for that same reason, the corpse could be Sawyer, a con man fond of aliases. The fact that the funeral parlor — which was called Hoffs Drawlar, an anagram of “flash forward� — was in the hood was probably designed to throw us off track. Most likely, the dead person is a new character whom we haven’t even met yet.

Since the writers have until January to figure this out, we hope the next season delivers. We want to know why Locke is so special, where Walt is coming from, what Penny Widmore’s dad is up to, if you can only get to the island by crashing a plane, who will take care of Aaron since Claire is usually loathe to, why this ageless Richard guy isn’t in control of the Others, and, finally, what makes this island so damn great. —Phoebe Reilly