Welcome back to the circus.

Clousseau is still batsh!t crazy. Dogen and Lennon take a swim. Sayid switches teams. Smokey does a little spring cleaning around the Temple. And Kate gets sucked along for the ride.

LOST 6x06: Sundown

For someone who grew up listening to the mopiest of mope-rock to call something dark, you know it had to be DARK! Perhaps the darkest episode of LOST to date, and sets the possibility that the show will end on a down note. Certainly not what most fans would expect, but when have LOST’s writers not thrown a wrench in the works for fans? A more interesting concept, though, is that the flash sideways is actually a culmination of the deals done with UnLocke and Jacob. Nadia is still alive, but Sayid can’t be with her. If this is the case, I worry about what will happen to Claire who believes UnLocke will get her Aaron back. I’m feeling like we’re going to see some merging of the two stories within the next 10 weeks, where the realization that the deals done for happiness weren't all they were chalked up to be. It’s a Wonderful LOST. (Zuzu’s petals!)

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2004, Los Angeles

Sayid arrives at Nadia’s house, but in this reality, she’s married to Sayid’s brother Omar, with two kids. (Torture for the torturer…) Sayid says he’d been translating contracts for an oil company. Omar’s business has been taking off, or so he claims.

Question: Was the oil company Sayid claimed to work for owned by Widmore?

Question: Was Nadia alive, but married and not with Sayid, because of the deal Sayid did with UnLocke on the island for Nadia to live if he followed him?

Omar wakes Sayid in the night to ask him to help by killing a gangster who lent him money and is putting the lean on him, even after re-paying his debt. Sayid says he’s not that guy anymore. The next day, however, Omar was beaten outside his store and Nadia begs him at the hospital to not take vengeance, but instead to go home and wait for her children and make them feel safe. (Jack was one of the doctors in the hospital.)

Nadia returns from the hospital and says that she knows Omar was responsible for getting beaten, but she clearly knows that Sayid is in love with her and doesn’t understand why he pushed her toward Omar, and he says it’s because he doesn’t deserve her.

Nerd alert: Sayid was repairing a vase that was broken with the boomerang that he brought the kids from Australia. A boomerang, in theory, always comes back to where it’s thrown – perhaps a metaphor for what may be happening on the show with a sideways timeline that may eventually be launching back with the earlier timeline. Or could it simply be an allusion to the fact that Sayid has come back to Nadia, where he started/belongs?

Sayid goes to meet his niece and nephew at the school bus and a carful of goons take him to the mob boss, who turns out to be Martin Keamy, the freighter mercenary. He tries to shake down Sayid for the cash that Omar owes him, threatening Omar’s family. And Sayid goes all Sayid on them, killing all three.

Question: In this sideways reality, did Keamy seem to be much more mortal than on the island when he seemed semi-indestructible?

As Keamy goes down, Sayid hears struggling from the walk-in freezer, and opens it to find someone being held captive. None other than Jin!

2007, On the island

Sayid pushes Dogen for answers on why he was tortured, but Dogen says that the tests were to determine Sayid’s evil-factor, and the scales tipped toward evil. Sayid claims, as always, that he’s a good man, but then he and Dogen get into a mixed-martial arts brawl. Dogen lunges to stab Sayid in the throat, when the baseball on his desk rolled off, and he commands Sayid to leave.

Clousseau and UnLocke are in the Temple garden area, standing on the line of ash. He tells her she needs to go in, but she says only if he keeps his promise to get Aaron back. “I always do what I say,” he replies.

Question: Does this set Claire up for disappointment in the sideways timeline? Sayid’s life is a disappointment, though Nadia was alive. What will happen to Claire and Aaron there?

Sayid tells Miles that he’s been banished because he’s evil. Miles tells him that he was dead for two hours and they were as shocked as anyone when he came back to life, so he wasn’t brought back by the Others. Clousseau bursts in to the Temple walls and says that UnLocke wants to see Dogen. He knows he’ll be killed if he goes, so she tells him to send someone that UnLocke won’t kill.

Dogen tells Lennon to put Clousseau in the hole and get Jack and Hurley. When Lennon says that they’re missing, Dogen wigs out and tells him to find them. Then he tells Sayid to come with him because “things have changed.” He tells Sayid that she’s under the influence of an angry man. He pulls out an ornate box (any ideas on this???) from a planter with a special dagger in it, which he asks Sayid to use to kill someone who he sees and knows is dead before he can speak, or the man “won’t stop until he has destroyed every living thing on this island.” Sayid asks why he’d do this for him, and Dogen tells him to prove that he’s still got good in his soul…by killing something. (Poor Sayid.)

Nerd alert: Ben said virtually the same line, “If you phone her boat, every single living person on this island will be killed” in the Through the Looking Glass season 3 finale episode to Desmond.

Kate arrives back at the Temple and Miles sympathetically says “Sawyer sent you packing.” He tells her that Claire was there, “acting all weird…still hot though.”

Sayid is in the jungle when suddenly everything goes quiet – no bird or bug noise – and then Smokey appears as UnLocke. Sayid stabbed him right in the chest with Dogen’s dagger, but he’d paused until Locke said “Hello Sayid.” UnLocke pulls the dagger out of his chest and hands back the dagger.

UnLocke says that Dogen sent Sayid out assuming he’d be killed. UnLocke promises him anything he wants to deliver a message to Dogen, including letting him see Nadia again. Sayid returns and delivers the message in the rain to the Others: Jacob is dead and they are free to leave the island with him, those who don’t will die. They were given until sundown to decide.

Kate gets Lennon to take her to see Clousseau, who is in a pit (“It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again...”) in the temple humming “Catch a Falling Star” – the song she’d sung to Aaron, and the song that Kate sang to Aaron after they were rescued – to herself. Kate tells Claire that she raised Aaron, though frustratingly doesn’t tell her that Mrs. Littleton is raising him. Claire says with a creepy grin, “He’s coming Kate. He’s coming and they can’t stop him.”

The Others are in a panic and most of them are leaving the Temple, as Lennon tries to get them to stay. Sayid brings the dagger back to Dogen, who tells Sayid about an accident he had after celebrating a promotion in which his son was killed. Jacob came to him in the hospital and said to him that he would save his son’s life, though he would have to come to the island and work for him and never see the boy again. Sayid says he made a similar bargain with UnLocke. Dogen points out that it’s sundown and Sayid throws him into the pool and drowns him. Lennon confronts Sayid, who then slits his throat. And the Smokey train pulls into the station, wreaking havoc unlike anything we’ve ever seen on LOST. Dozens of men and women are killed as Kate goes to look for Clousseau, when Ilana, Ben, Sun and Lapidus burst in to try to save them. Ben goes after Sayid, who maniacally smiles as he tells Ben there’s no time left for him.

Miles asks Sun where Jin is, who was thrilled to know he was still alive, and Ilana pressed on the wall at the spot that Jacob had told Hurley to look for. They open a secret door and are safe.

Nerd alert: The symbol was a Shen ring. The shen ring is most typically carried by one of our favorite LOST god references, Horus, but also Nekhbet. When the shen ring encircled objects, it was seen to eternally protect them. Is this what the rings of ash were meant to be?

The camera pans the destruction left behind, as Sayid, Clousseau and Kate join UnLocke and the rest of his now-followers.

Question: Did they look a bit more rag tag, as if they were the crew that we saw walking through the jungle when Mr. Eko and Jin were searching for Michael in the “…And Found” episode, back in season 2, when they saw the barefoot Others walking and a child holding a grubby teddy bear?

Comment with your thoughts below!