Lost: Nuclear Family

Wow... so much goodness to crunch on here, and while there was no music (aside from Composer Michael Giacchino's always excellent score,) I can't help but geek out a bit here, as it was our first episode of season five to enter into the Lost cannon of greatness. But is there really a need for me to 'geek out,' when every one else has already done it before I even had a chance to watch "Jughead." Thanks again to Fisher Communications and Dish Network, I don't have ABC in my household, and thus have my own time warped viewing. Here are some great points brought out across the net from late last night to early this morning.

1. "Jughead" the bomb has historical truth. - "Jughead" was a real cryogenic hydrogen bomb that never detonated after the successful test of the first dry-fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, operation "Castle Bravo," in March of 1954. (Popular Mechanics Blog)

2. Faraday's Mom is Ms. Hawking - As we guessed last week, Ms. Hawking has to be Faraday's mum. She's in L.A., and it turns out the mom's in L.A. The enhanced version of episode two ("The Lie") revealed that Ms. Hawking's first name is Eloise. And the name Faraday gave his lab rat in "The Constant" was Eloise.

3. Ellie = Eloise? - Following #2, could a certain rifle-toting ingenue be nicknamed "Ellie" as a shortened form of Eloise? Is Ellie a young Eloise, and by extension, Faraday's mother? He did seem to recognize her. The accent is the only wrench in the that theory.

4. And daddy too? - Following #2 and #3 (and the fact that Charles Widmore has been funding Faraday's research), we might as well theorize that Widmore is Faraday's birth father, right? Faraday would then be Penny Widmore's "brother from an Other mother." Also recall the Luke/Leia Star Wars reference from Faraday in "Confirmed Dead" (4.02): "I'm Daniel Faraday. I'm here to rescue you." Widmore makes a nice Darth Vader daddy, don't you think? By the way, they called him "Jones" in episode two, which is the real last name of a certain Archie comic book character.

5. Jughead as Time Lord? - That comic book character is, of course, the Archie comic sidekick Jughead, who, as the great Doc Jensen points out, had his own short-lived spinoff comic book series called Jughead's Time Police. In it we find our hero traveling through time to correct anomalies in time that were erasing family and loved ones in the present. Crazy, huh?

6. The Great Smokey Dragon - Another geektastic tidbit from Jensen concerns physicist John Wheeler, who died less than a year ago. One of Wheeler's theories is that "the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing [creation] of not just the present and the future but the past as well." This is partially why we see Faraday participating in the excavation of the donkey wheel. Affecting this loop is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which allows for a "fatal flaw in any well-ordered plan." Wheeler's nickname for the uncertainty principle? "The Great Smokey Dragon." The smoke monster (which does look like a chinese dragon) seems to come into play when the rules are broken, like when Ben "summons" the supernatural entity in "The Shape of Things to Come."

7. Ceteri narro Latin? - The Others speak Latin? We're not going down a Rosicrucian rabbit hole any time soon, are we?

8. Jacob picks Ben after Widmore - There's been all sorts of mystery surrounding Widmore's obsession with the island, and finding out that he was once an Other narrows it a bit. The theory that I'm drawn to is that Widmore was at one point the leader of the Others, and was usurped by Ben (via Jacob) post-purge, which would explain a lot of the animosity, and lines from previous episodes like, "It's mine, Benjamin, and always was," and "everything you have, you took from me."

What else did I miss? You know, lists like this are kind of lazy, but it's always a good Lost when you're numbering theories the next morning. Here's hoping for another one next week.

Previously: Find me a shirt! (Episodes 5.01-5.02)