Lost: It's my dad in a box!

"Lost" spoilers coming up just as soon as my wife and I work out our own code for "a man with a gun is holding my daughter in the closet"...

Curioser and curioser. I fully expect certain revelations like the truth about the island's Magic Box to be either too prolonged or too silly when they come, and I'm annoyed that Hurley's been AWOL the last two weeks (thank goodness he was in the previews), but I'm not going to complain overly much about any episode that features Kevin Tighe as Locke's terrifying dad, or one that has Locke back to his insanely selfish primitive man self from the pre-hatch days.

So let's see, John: You don't want to ever leave the island, so you blow up the only means of escape for everyone? That's not taking your ball and going home; that's taking your ball and then sealing everyone else inside the ball-free gym forever. If you don't want to leave some day if rescuers ever come, don't go with them. And if you're annoyed that The Others are cheating with their electricity and white meat chicken, just go live deep in the bowels of the jungle by your lonesome. Rousseau's shown that it can be done (though she did have a little cabin for a while).

But while Locke was being an idiot, he was doing it in the way that we all came to know and love in season one. I vastly prefer the zealot whose solution to every problem is a timed explosive to the guy who just pushes buttons all day.

I love watching Tighe work (and now that we know that one of his many aliases is Seward, which is only a hop, skip and a jump from Sawyer, is their any doubt that he's the man who destroyed our Sawyer's family?), but I'm glad that the flashbacks were kept at a minimum. Better to spend more time on the island, especially with the Michael Emerson/Terry O'Quinn acting duel, which was the first time a character has successfully matched wits with Ben. Locke may have done what Ben wanted, but he understood that the whole time and didn't let Ben's agenda interfere with his own, where Jack would have done the opposite just to be a dick about it.

So now Seward/Sawyer/Cooper is on the island, eh? (Along with Nestor Carbonell from "Not in Portland.") This raises at least three possibilities: first, that when The Others gathered intel on the Oceanic 815 survivors, Ben decided for some reason that it would be valuable to have a personal means of manipulating some of them and had his people on the mainland kidnap Cooper (and possibly others); second, that Cooper was on a plane or a boat that unexpectedly crashed her the same way that Eko's brother did; third, that he came out of the Magic Box.

A few other thoughts:

• Glad somebody finally tried to tell Alex the truth about her mom. (My wife rarely watches "Lost," but she was with me for this one, and when she asked what Sayid was talking about, I said, "Her mom's the crazy French lady who lives in the jungle," to which she replied, "Of course her mom's the crazy French lady who lives in the jungle!" Maybe you had to be there.)
  
• Ben's latest henchman, the one who was guarding Sayid at the playground, was played by Brian Goodman, who was the best thing about ABC's otherwise underwhelming mobsters 'n FBI agents show "Line of Fire."
  
• So weird to see Kate on the island sneaking into a tastefully-decorated bungalow and hearing piano music. Also, is this the first we've seen Jack can tickle the ivories, or did it come up in one of his flashbacks?

What did everybody else think?