Tonite on Lost: Follow The Leader

Synopsis
Jack and Kate find themselves at odds over the direction to take to save their fellow island survivors, Locke further solidifies his stance as leader of "The Others," and Sawyer and Juliet come under scrutiny from the Dharma Initiative.

Written by Paul Zbyszewski & Elizabeth Sarnoff
Directed by Stephen Williams

Guest List
Nestor Carbonell as Richard Alpert
Francois Chau as Dr. Pierre Chang
Doug Hutchison as Horace Goodspeed
Patrick Fischler as Phil
Eric Lange as Radzinsky
David S. Lee as younger Charles Widmore
Alice Evans as younger Eloise Hawking
Leslie Ishii as Lara
Sebastian Siegel as Erik
Kevin Chapman as Mitch
Elisabeth Blake as Vanessa
William Makozak as Captain Bird
Victoria Goring as mother
Maya Henssens as young Charlotte

Yes, I've cheated and peeked at spoilers for tonite's penultimate Season 5 episode on a Lost fansite, which is pretty complete because Lost producer Carlton Cuse screened the entire episode at Ohio State University last night. I won't spoil things for the folks who don't want to know, but I will give you some vague hints...

The episode is split between 1977/Dharma Times and 2008/Locke-Sun-Ben times. It's a non-centric episode, meaning it doesn't focus on one character. We'll see all our current main Losties except for Des/Penny.

Richard Alpert will get quite a lot of screen time in BOTH sections and we get more confirmation that he is Very Old and he's the designated advisor guy to the Hostiles/Others but, contrary to some rumours, this is NOT a Richard-centric episode.

John Locke will continue in his new role as New Improved Super Confident Leader Guy much to Ben's chagrin and Alpert's amazement.

Three of our Losties will get a major smackdown.

We'll have a little mourning for Daniel (who is indeed dead) but not that much.

Jughead will play a role.

As usual, Hurley gets the funniest scene.

And things start to get very Indiana Jonesish for some of our heroes and Das Booty for others...

Next week, the two hour season finale titled "The Incident" airs and for the first time there aren't any major spoilers/synopsis swirling about the Internet which might mean that ABC/Disney has got this thing under tight wraps. But several actors have hinted that it's going to be big and crazy and game-changing with some putting it that they're not sure how they can pull off next season. Oh, and there is another Big Death to come, on the level of Charlie's death from two years ago...my money is on Sayid, since he's pretty much wrapped up his storyline AND he'll have to be punished for shooting a 14 year old in the chest...even if it was Hitler to be, Ben Linus.

Namaste.