A Tale of "A Tale of Two Cities"

Welcome back, Lostophiles -
So many questions from Episode 301, entitled "A Tale of Two Cities," and only one clear answer. So let's start with the answer:
Ben.
Now we know the "real" name of the creepy Other-leading character played by Michael Emerson. (Of course, lingering in the background is the question of the who the real Henry Gale was, and what is his connection to the Island).
As for the questions…
The opening sequence of Season 3 paid homage to the openings of both Seasons 1 and 2. As in Season 1, the first shot was a close-up of an eyeball, as if to tell us that we will be seeing things, at least in the short term, partially from this person's point of view. In Season 1, it was Jack. Now, we meet Juliet. As in Season 2, Season 3 opened with a new character in a new environment listening to some comfort music, blissfully unaware of how her existence was about to change. When we meet Juliet, she has just started playing "Downtown" on her CD player (CD player? Ok, not the latest thing at Best Buy, but poor Desmond spent 3 years with nothing but a turntable!). She is lost in some thought or other, and may even be upset about something. Then she is jolted back to her comfortable suburban environment by burning muffins, the first sign that today's book club meeting will not be a smooth one.
As experienced Lost watchers, we immediately see the opening as another pre-island flashback. Juliet lives in the burbs, hosts book clubs, and has a funny plumber working on her pipes. She even has petty little squabbles with the neighbors, including someone named Ben who is no longer invited to the book club (and who would not have approved of the Steven King volume, any way). But we are jolted from the notion of "pre-island" flashback when we realize the loud rumble outside is the EM rumble from the Swan hatch, where Desmond forgot to push the button. Moments later, we see, for the first time from the outside, Oceanic Flight 815 breaking up in midair. "Henry Gale," not yet matched to the name "Ben," appears and looks quite concerned. He immediately turns to Juliet's plumber - none other than the late Ethan Rom, and dispatches him towards the fuselage. He then sends another familiar face, Goodwin, to the tail section crash site, and orders both men to blend in and return with "lists" in 3 days. And if it wasn't clear before, we get a doozy of a long shot before the first commercial, showing "Otherville" to be a suburban enclave on a patch of island far, far away from the crash sites.
As interesting as the rest of the episode was, it did not compare to these opening minutes.
We got no follow-up on a few important questions:
One can only do so much with 1 hour of TV, I suppose, but we heard not a peep out of any 815 survivors other than Jack, Kate and Sawyer. Did Locke, Eko and/ or Desmond survive? Where did Sayid, Jin and Sun end up when the Other camp turned out to be a fake? We don't know.
Here's what we did get.
We got a series of Jack flashbacks. While there may be some more context for these scenes later, I can't help but feel they served one small purpose - to give meaning to the squawk box in Jack's fish tank. After all, we already know Jack's ex, Sarah, left him for another man, and that his father, Christian, had a soon-to-be-fatal drinking problem. While the "Jack suspects his Dad had an affair with his wife" plotline added some color to Jack's backstory, I'm wondering how much more water there is in Jack's backstory well…
But then there's the squawk box. Moments after we see Jack's flashback of his father warning him to "let it go" when it comes to Sarah, we see Jack in the tank, where a decades-old intercom box starts spewing static. In the background of this static is Jack's father's voice, uttering the same phrase, "let it go." Aha! Another vision of Jack's dad alive on the island…
Or maybe not. Minutes later, Juliet, trying to get Jack to eat and drink something, lets him know he will start suffering hallucinations if he doesn't get some food or water in him soon. Has he already? And didn't his first vision of his father on the island come just before Jack discovered the survivors' water source in the cave? Could he have been "hallucinating" then, too?
Juliet also tells Jack that the Others gave him medication of some kind. Indeed, he and Kate both notice a small bandage on the inside of their elbows when they first awaken in captivity. Does Sawyer have one too? We don't know. What is the shot? Or why did they draw the blood, if that's what happened? Good questions. But "Lost" doesn't answer questions on the same episode in which they're asked…
Meanwhile, Tom (formerly bearded "Mr. Friendly") instructs Kate to shower and leaves her a pretty dress to put on. He comments that she's not his type (really? Just who is?). Kate soon learns her clothes were burned by the Others. No idea as to why. Ben gives her a lovely breakfast (albeit in handcuffs - she sure does get put in those a lot), and informs her this was a touch of civilization before the two weeks of hell she is about to endure. Huh? What's that all about?
And then there's our third mainstay, Sawyer, left in a strange cage, with antiquated devices that make it abundantly clear to anyone not named Sawyer that he's a pigeon in a cognitive psychology experiment. He got the shocks and the food pellets to prove it, too. Across from Sawyer is a young man, whom Sawyer calls "Chachi" (I wonder what my Sawyer nickname would be) but whom Tom later refers to as Carl. Carl appears to be an old pro at the "life in a cage" thing, but who is he, and where did he come from? And where did the Others take him after his failed escape attempt, when they vacate his cage for Kate?
The short-lived Kate/ Sawyer interaction was a nice touch. There is a real bond forming between these two (evident, as well, to Ben, who asked Kate earlier why she asked about Sawyer before asking about Jack). Guess the two criminals have a lot in common.
We also got another DHARMA installation, called "The Hydra." It incorporates zoo cages and aquarium tanks. We know it once housed bears (the polar bears from season 1?) and dolphins and sharks. The shark is a nice touch that indicates not everything on this show is pre-ordained. Famous behind the scenes info says the shark in Season 2 that sported a Dharma logo on its tail did so because of a prank by the effects guys, and not because the logo was written into the script. But why not incorporate that into the story once its out there?
Seeing the Hydra station, I can't help but recall the Swan orientation film, which noted some of the prongs of the Dharma Initiative included electromagnetism (umm, the Swan?), psychology (the Pearl?), zoology (the Hydra), and others, including parapsychology (something we have not seen yet, one imagines).
But the real key to this episode came from the Juliet/ Jack interactions. She asks where he was coming from when the plane crashed. Did she not know it was a flight from Australia? She also asks why he was in Australia. Later on, she shows Jack a dossier that contains his entire life before the island. How did she get this? Did the Others have files on certain people that they knew would one day matter to them? Do they have investigatively-talented contacts in the off-island world? And how many other files do they have? I for one would enjoy a look-see at those files, but I suspect that may be a long time coming.
And then there was the question from Jack - "are you people the DHARMA Initiative." Juliet's answer to this yes-no question was pretty non-committal: "that was a long time ago." Sounds like a yes, but then again, what does the rest of that response mean?
Finally, the last exchange of the episode, the one that matched "Ben" to "Fenry," suggests that Juliet was playing Jack all along, including during their flirtation with drowning when Jack failed to listen to the "don't open that door" warnings.
I'm eager to learn more about Juliet. She seems like a nice gal, but then again, she took out Jack with one punch and dropped Sawyer with a trank dart faster than you can say "there's a stubbly man with sardonic wit on the loose."
To let you all in on the word from the producers, their first podcast of the next season reveals that there are multiple factions of Others, that Kate will choose between Jack and Sawyer, and that we will learn what put Locke into a wheelchair in the coming weeks.
And I leave you with a parting thought. Time travel…(think back to Hurley's comment last season that the radio transmission he and Sayid picked up could be coming from any time, and the voice of Jack's late father coming over the squawk box). I don't usually theorize about Lost (it seems premature with so many clues left to discover), but this at least seems to have been teased.
Until next week!