Craziest Season Of Lost Continues!

Spoilers Ahead!

So... here are just some of the "replacements" that Vicki and I spotted in regard to Ajura Flight 316 recreating Oceanic Flight 815:

• the dead body, of course (Locke proxying for Christian)
• although a bit of a cheat, Frank Lupidis (who was supposed to fly 815 but was sick) is the pilot for 316
• someone's in handcuffs (Sayid this time) and under guard (once again, a Marshal of the opposite gender)
• one of the passengers is reading a DC Comic that's printed in Spanish (Hurley, instead of Walt, and Y: The Last Man rather than Green Lantern/Flash... oh, and Y? written by Lost creative team member Brian K. Vaughan! and finally, since I just know everyone's wondering: yes, I own the English version of the comic, just as I did with the GL/Flash version!)
• someone's carrying a guitar in a case (Hurley paying respect to his dead buddy, Charlie)
• we get to see Jack getting hassled at the check-in counter (only a little bit this time) as he tries to transport a dead body from Point A to Point B

As soon as it became apparent that the returning castaways were going to get to the island by way of a flash and not a crash, my first thought was: How the Hell are the flight crew ever going to explain away that not only did half a dozen passengers disappear from the plane in mid-flight, but that they were also five of the Oceanic 6?! That's gotta be the biggest news story of the millennium, doesn't it? (Small trivia note: one of the early episodes of the late, lamented Journeyman series, which was all about time travel, dealt with exactly that scenario when the lead character "jumped" (timewise) from a plane that was in transit... and it caused quite a problem for him!)

Obviously this episode set up a bunch of new flashbacks-to-come:

• What happened with Kate and Aaron? (Vicki's theory, which I think is excellent: Kate decided to heed Claire's ghostly warning about bringing Aaron back to the island. Kate therefore took Aaron to his maternal grandmother, explained the situation to the older Aussie woman and "did the right thing" by leaving him with her)
• How did Sayid end up in handcuffs and headed to Guam?
• Ditto for Hurley, but minus the handcuffs (pretty nice move by him to buy up 78 seats, which I guess he did with his 2nd fortune... the settlement from Oceanic, rather than the cursed lottery one that he let get away from him)
• Did Ben get all beat up following through on his promise to Charles Widmore, meaning that Penny's now deceased and Desmond's a widower, single parent and pretty darned pissed?!
• How did Sun ever rationalize leaving behind her daughter in a mad attempt to re-unite with her "dead" husband, all on the strength of a wedding band that could have been taken off a corpse, washed ashore?

For a show that's explaining so much, and moving so quickly, it's still sure raising a lot of new questions!

And "We're not going to Guam, are we?" was the killer line of the episode, I'd say. I was hoping that Frank was going with the castaways to the island, but I guess that's up in the air at the moment (same with the Marshal and the other dude who offered his condolences to Jack at the airport). As usual, I already can't wait for next week!!

P.S. This is my 100th blog post about Lost, according to the labels section! That's pretty crazy!