You've got ink on your forehead.

Jack pulls an Alice and goes through the looking-glass. Claire tries out as a “Before” model for a Pantene commercial, and then gets all “The Shining” on Justin. Jacob looks constipatedly at Hurley throughout the episode. Jin finds out that Alt Dogen imparts parenting wisdom. Oh, and Alt Jack’s got a teenage son. No biggie.

LOST 6x05: The Lighthouse

Vacation and work challenges have delayed the publishing of this recap. (Ep. 6x04 will go up next - sorry.) The season sadly is chugging along, with another killer episode in The Lighthouse. We find out what Infected Claire (Clousseau) has been doing on the island all these years – mostly going batshit while evading the Others – and we learn of a mysterious lighthouse that’s somehow been hidden from view in all their time there.

What did you think? Hit me with your comments below

2004 Alt Timeline

Jack’s on the phone with his mother discussing his father’s will, and somehow becomes acutely aware of his appendix scar. He asks his mom about it and it seems as though he doesn’t recall having the operation, although he was apparently 7 or 8 at the time. A kid that age would have a vivid memory of such an event. Is this a nod to the fact that this is a false timeline?

Jack arrives at the St. Mary’s Academy and picks up his son (what?!), David. (David – another Biblical name.) David storms up to his room in Jack’s house and is giving Jack the cold shoulder. Jack picks up The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll and asks David if he’s reading it, reminding him that he used to read the book to him when he was little. He said that he always wanted to hear about Kitty and Snowdrop.

Nerd alert: Kitty and Snowdrop were Alice’s black and white kittens in Through the Looking-Glass. Black and white are the recurring theme on LOST. Good vs. evil. In the book, the black kitten, Kitty, is connected to the Red Queen and Snowdrop, the white kitten, to the White Queen. Wikipedia has the following to say about Through the Looking-Glass: “Through the Looking-Glass [is] a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the first book begins outdoors, in the warm month of May, (May 4), uses frequent changes in size as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of playing cards; the second opens indoors on a snowy, wintry night exactly six months later, on November 4 (the day before Guy Fawkes Night), uses frequent changes in time and spatial directions as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of chess. In it, there are many mirror themes, including opposites, time running backwards, and so on.”

Nerd alert: Post Oceanic 6 rescue in LA, Jack was reading Alice in Wonderland to Aaron. So as things are mirrored in this alt timeline, it makes sense, I guess, that he would have read it as well to David. Alice has been a consistent theme throughout the series.

David storms off and Jack tries asks what’s wrong. David replies, “we see each other like once a month, can’t we just…get through it?”

Mrs. Shephard offers Jack a drink while they are looking for Christian’s will, which he refuses. They find the will on a shelf, and as she reads it, she asks Jack if he’s ever heard of a Claire Littleton. (Question: Was there a slight glimpse of recognition when she mentioned Claire’s name?)

Jack gets home with pizza and David’s gone. He goes to his mom’s house to look for him and hear’s an answering machine message confirming David’s audition slot at a music conservatory. The second message was one from Jack calling from Sydney when he went to pick up his father’s body. The message, I believe, was the message we saw Jack leave from Sydney in the original timeline, though the original message clearly couldn’t have been for David.

Nerd alert: The house number is 233 - one of the few references to the numbers we've seen in the alt timeline). And the key to David's mom's house is under a rabbit. Another allusion to Alice - down the rabbit hole and/or a visual reference to Ben's rabbit on the island?

Jack rushes to the conservatory to hear the end of David’s audition and is clearly dumbfounded that he had no idea this was happening or that music was this important to him. A random kid tells him that David’s really good. Then the boy’s father – Dogen! – says that the kids are too young for this pressure and that it’s tough to not be able to help. (A nod to Jack’s role of the perpetual “fixer”?)

As David is unchaining his bike, Jack commends his performance and they have their first real conversation of the episode. David says that he never told his father that he was still playing piano because he didn’t want to Jack to see him fail. He tells David that his own father used to say that he “didn’t have what it takes” and he spent his whole life carrying that around with him. But Jack tells him that he just wants to be a part of his life and all a wall seems to have been broken down.

Nerd alert: The sign at the entry to the audition said in large letters: "Welcome Candidates".

Question: Is David possibly a Candidate or future Candidate in this timeline? Both Jack and Christian have connections to the island, and although we don't know for sure yet, we can assume Jack's granddad did as well.

2007 On Island

- Jack and Hurley sory arc:

Dogen tells Jack that he has free will, but he would try to stop him if he did. He asks if Kate, Jin or Sawyer are coming back, and Jack says that they likely aren’t.

Hurley enters the Temple to look for some food, and Jacob is there waiting to give Hurley an assignment to help someone who is trying to get to the island find it.

Question: Who needs to get to the island?

Sayid confronts Jack with a laundry list of questions about why he’s being stared at to what the pill was that they wanted him to take, and Jack tells him that they were going to poison him.

Hurley is in a hallway looking at a wall of hieroglyphs, when Dogen questions what he’s doing there. Jacob appears and tells Hurley to say that he is a candidate, and Dogen backs off. Jacob says that Hurley should have brought Jack too and tells him how to convince Jack to come along.

Outside, Hurley tells Jack, “You have what it takes.” Clearly this was what Jack needed to hear, for reasons yet unknown, and Jack and Hurley set off.

Jack and Hurley run into Kate in the jungle, and Kate sets off to find Claire, even though Jack says that there’s something wrong with her.

Hurley and Jack are talking and Hurley asks why he and Kate never got together and had kids. Jack says he thinks he’d be a terrible dad, but Hurley disagrees. They come upon Shannon’s asthma inhaler at the caves they were living after the 815 crash. Hurley sees the Adam & Eve skeleton and poses the question that we’ve been pondering for years: “What if we time traveled again to - like - dinosaur times and then we died and got buried here. What if these skeletons are us?”

As they trek through the jungle some more Hurley remarks that it’s like old times – on a mission in the jungle they don’t quite understand. Hurley tells Jack he came back because Jacob asked him to. Jack says he thought the island could fix him.

They arrive at a lighthouse and Jack asks how they could never have seen it, to which Hurley replies that guesses they weren’t looking for it.

Question: Didn’t the lighthouse appear in strangely good shape for as old as the architecture appeared to be?

Hurley and Jack ascend the lighthouse and find a fire pit and mirrors – the design certainly seems old. Hurley checks the notes on his arm and pulls the chain to orient the lighthouse to 108^o. Jack sees images in the mirrors and then realizes his name is on the dial at 23^o and turns the dial – at which point he sees a reflection of his house. Amazed that some man he doesn’t recall meeting has apparently been watching him for…years?...he smashes the mirrors with a telescope.

Nerd alert: It seems Jacob has been using the lighthouse to watch the Candidates through the "looking-glass".

Question: Just a continuity error that “Shephard” and some of the other 815ers’ names seem to be so much more darkly written than the other names on the dial and in the cave that UnLocke took Sawyer to?

Nerd alert: Thanks to the diligence of others, here are the rest of the names that appear on the dial.

Jacob shows up and asks Hurley how it went. Although he says he failed, Jacob shows Hurley that he wanted Jack to understand how important he is by seeing the lighthouse. Jacob tells Hurley that he had to get them far away from the Temple because someone bad was coming there, and that they don’t have time to warn the folks at the temple.

- Clousseau’s camp story arc:

Clousseau frees Jin from the bear trap, but passes out from the pain after she says she’s been out in the woods since they left the island.

Jin wakes up in Clousseau’s camp as she’s bringing in Justin, who apparently was playing possum when she shot at him and Aldo in the jungle. She ties him up and Jin realizes that Clousseau’s not right. She pushes Justin for answers on where her son is, thinking that the Others have him. Justin warns Jin that they’re not safe with her.

Nerd alert: The actor playing Justin, Dayo Ade, also played “BLT” on the original late 80s/early 90s Canadian cult kids dramas, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. (Zit Remedy!!!)

Justin tries to convince Jin to untie him, but Claire comes in to tend to and stitch up Jin’s wounds. She says that she’s had to move around the jungle a lot to hide from the Others. She says that Christian and “her friend” told her that the Others took Aaron.

Clousseau is interrogating Justin who instists they’ve never had Aaron. Jin steps in to say that Kate’s been raising him and Clousseau is confused and upset. So she axes Justin in the gut, to Jin’s amazement.

Question: Why didn’t Jin explain that Kate was trying to protect Aaron and that they hadn’t seen Claire, so they could rightfully have assumed she was dead?

Jin tells Clousseau he was lying about Kate and Aaron to try to save Justin’s life, and that the Others do have Aaron and he says he’ll take her to the Temple through a secret entrance. She gets all wiggy and says that if he hadn’t been lying that she’d have killed Kate. Then UnLocke walks in. “John?!”, Jin says, amazed. Claire replies, “That’s not John. That’s my friend.”

Drop some comment love below.

-Sean Salo