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Unknowns for me at this point are Jin, Sun, Claire and Hugo.

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First there's Locke, rifling through an Ambrose Bierce short story for...what? Clues about the hatch? The real clue, most likely, is the story itself. ''Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'' is a massive parallel-reality fake-out, the 19th-century granddaddy of ''it was all a dream!'' Goes like this: A Rebel sympathizer is being hanged on a bridge by Union troops. The rope breaks; he falls into the river and escapes. A harrowing journey home ensues. He dodges bullets. He crashes through the woods. Finally he makes it home. His wife opens her arms to him...and the rope catches, breaking his neck. It was all a fantasy, and the joke is on you, dear reader. What does this have to do with Lost? Perhaps it's a clue to the dream state these survivors inhabit. Perhaps it pertains specifically to Locke, who entertains the grandest illusions of the island's inherent beneficence.

And then there's that manuscript, the one Hurley was reading before Sayid came along to play radio. (Yes, Sayid. Remember him? Gosh how I miss that guy. Oh, and by the way, Jack, if you're starting an army? Ask an army officer for help. Not a police officer.) The book is Bad Twin, by Gary Troup, a mystery writer who boarded flight 815 and is now presumed dead. From Amazon (where the ''real'' book will soon be sold, in a gloriously meta tie-in):

Paul Artisan, P.I. is a new version of an old breed — a righter of wrongs, someone driven to get to the bottom of things. Too bad his usual cases are of the boring malpractice and fraud variety. Until now. His new gig turns on the disappearance of one of a pair of twins, adult scions of a rich but tragedy-prone family. The missing twin — a charismatic poster-boy for irresponsibility — has spent his life daring people to hate him, punishing himself endlessly for his screw-ups and misdeeds. The other twin — Artisan's client — is dutiful and resentful in equal measure....Troup's long-awaited Bad Twin is a suspenseful novel that touches on many powerful themes, including the consequence of vengeance, the power of redemption, and where to turn when all seems lost.

The dueling dualities continue. Locke and Eko? Ana-Lucia and Jack? Sawyer and Kate? All light-dark pairings, all ''twins,'' in a sense.

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Lest we forget Sawyer is a lying, murderous sonofa*****, we saw him pulling off two ''long cons'' in parallel: one in flashback (which included a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Kate's mom, Diane, waiting on Sawyer at a diner) and one on the island, involving an unseen and (at least for me) unguessed accomplice, Charlie. Nice to see them diving into the abyss with these characters instead of rehabilitating them.

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an evil dude having all the guns

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The writers essentially wrote themselves into that lone answer in the set of multiple choices on a test that contains the "All" or "Never" or "None" statement that, by definition, must be eliminated as a choice.

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