Dialogue on this show still frustrates me, and after five seasons of lines like “Someone is coming” and the island-wide moratorium on specific, probing queries, it’s probably time for me to just walk away. But while Jack’s lack of curiosity seems like downright imbecility, Sayid does a much better job of selling the vagueness as carrying a hidden significance instead of a meaningless delay. (Tell it to me in Star Wars! Sayid’s version: These are not the droids you’re looking for. Jack’s version: I don’t know – Are they the droids you’re looking for? Is someone looking for these droids? We have to go back!) The result is an episode where the philosophy and thematic content are more palatable and have direct, concrete consequences on Sayid’s actions. When Sayid ponders whether he’s actually good or evil, he makes the whole journey from insisting he’s a decent man to giving us one of the creepiest crazy villain smiles I’ve ever seen, all inside of one fully packed hour. Even if that experience doesn’t give fans another tangible answer to the Lost puzzle, it shifts the character landscape so dramatically that it hardly matters.

The episode also had a lot of strong minor plotlines going for it. I loved the growing realization that Claire Crazypants is just waiting for an opportunity to rip Kate apart with her bare hands, even if the pit did give me some unsubtle “it puts the lotion in the basket” flashbacks. It was also great to see Keamy come back in a useful way, and nice to see that time itself may shift, but Keamy will always be a crazed, violent guy with creepy eyes who inevitably gets killed off. And speaking of killed off, I never connected enough with Dogen to care much when Sayid drowned him, but I did like his translator/sidekick, Lennon. I’ve missed John Hawkes since Deadwood, and I was hoping he’d become interesting enough to keep around for a while. But he was sacrificed to Sayid’s downward spiral into evil madness, so I guess that’s all right.

More than anything, the music for this scene freaked me out. It's so rare we get a new musical cue on this show, and Claire is already scary enough to make "Catch A Falling Star" seriously frightening.

This episode does little to develop my questions from last week about whether the nature of Lost is inherently scifi or fantasy (or something entirely different), except possibly as it relates to Sayid’s fate. But as I mentioned in the beginning, with an episode where the vague philosophical musings are followed swiftly by Sayid slitting throats and Smoky slaughtering everyone in the temple, Lost is able to set aside some of the deeper critical fretting that comes with frustration. Some of the audience may be dying for answers, but Cuse and Lindelof have made it very clear that the goal is entertainment, not instruction. When the show is sufficiently entertaining, that division feels satisfying.

If only we could have two good episodes in a row so that it didn’t feel like we have to earn every compelling episode by sitting through a dull one, I wouldn’t need to spend every other episode feeling cast into existential crisis about the show’s ultimate purpose. Fingers crossed for next week.