"Well... Here We Go."

With that one line in last week's episode of Lost, the ever-lovely Juliet announced the ending of the latest status quo for the show and possibly foreshadowed darker days to come. Spoilers ahead!

"Some Like It Hoth" provided a lot of interesting backstory on Miles Straume, continued the comedy duet between him and Hurley, introduced "the circle of trust" within the Dharma Initiative while at the same time providing more hints as to why the question "what lies in the shadow of the statue?" is so important, confirmed the theory that many of us had about the significance of Dr Pierre Chang's infant son who showed up in Season Five's premiere (yup, that was Miles!) and gave us a return appearance by the intriguing Naomi Dorrit in a recruiting role for Charles Widmore. One of the season's best lines came right around the midpoint of "Hoth", when Miles responded to Hurley's assessment of Dr Chang ("Dude, that guy's a total douche") with the zinger, "That douche is my dad." The choice of 1977 as the year that the second set of time travelers landed in is finally acknowledged for its geek cred when Hurley's shown writing his own, mostly faithful version of The Empire Strikes Back in response to the release of Star Wars at that time. ("And let's face it: the Ewoks sucked, dude!") Not to mention that we were teased with the question of just what are the ridiculous Polar Bear experiments that are going on over on Hydra Island, anyway?

Anyone who's stayed with Lost this long and isn't absolutely hanging on every word by now probably should just give up and move on. Honestly, I don't think this show can conceivably get any better than it's been over the past two seasons. It's fully into "Rewarding the Fans Mode" and this particular fan(atic) couldn't be happier.