I said it before and I will say it again. Lost Season 6 feels totally energized because this is the first time in the show’s history where we do not leave groups of characters just totally unaccounted for, basically. Even though we did not see Kate, Sayid and Sawyer, their group was represented by The Man in Black, Jack and Hurley were around, and so were Ben, Lapidis, Miles and Illana.

The summary: Miles exposes that Ben killed Jacob and Illana puts him to digging his own grave. The Man in Black tries to recruit him, and when he escapes and gets Illana at gunpoint he apologizes and says he is going to The Man in Black because he is the only one who will have him. She forgives him and lets him join Team Jacob rather than join up with the bad guys. Jack and Hurley go to the Black Rock where Alpert wants to kill himself, but can’t because of Jacob’s “gift” of eternal life; Jack has similar protection, and they join the rest of Team Jacob on the beach. Then Widmore shows up in a submarine. In the Alt U history teacher Ben Linus tries a power play to become the principal of the high school, but gives it up to help his student Alex, the girl he raised as his daughter in the other timeline.

Lost is never subtle but its clunky pulpy symbolism is part of the fun — it was fun to start out with Dr Linus teaching about Elba and Waterloo, and to see his plays for power and leadership on the island transposed into a high school setting, where he is teamed with Doc Arstz, after receiving some encouraging words from Locke of all people. Michael Emerson is the best actor on Lost, just under O’Quinn, and it is fun to see the energy under the buttoned up exterior and plain setting.

And wow they did a good make-up job on the actor who played his dad, and who is now a good guy — the Alt U is once again the place where bad dads become good ones.

But this plot line had some serious problems, not the least of which was Alex showing up at Ben’s house in the middle of the night. I know she was not even his biological daughter in the main U but it just seemed at times like there was the possibility of a hook-up there that I did not want and that distracted me.

But this was nothing next to one of the worst scenes I have seen on TV in a while, and, without thinking about it that hard, maybe Lost’s worst: the blackmail scene. If the principal does not step down and make Ben principal, Ben will release info about the principal’s inappropriate affair. But the principal counters that if Ben does not drop this blackmail plan Alex will not get the letter of recommendation she wants from him to Yale. Ben backs down. For starters the obvious plan here is to have started with the demand that the principal step down, give him the job, AND write Alex the letter he knew she wanted, all in exchange for Ben not letting his secret out. Even after he made his demand this still could have been negotiated. Surely the end of the principal’s marriage and being fired in shame was worth a lousy letter of rec. It seems like the principal was threatening not just no letter but a BAD letter if Ben exposed him: but how much weight would a bad letter have from a disgraced principal, especially once the admissions committee found out that she was one of the pet students of the man who exposed him? And ALL of this is predicated on the idea that the deciding factor for getting into an Ivy League college is one letter of rec from someone who attended, EVEN IF THAT PERSON BECAME A HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL. It is not exactly like Yale is going to be worried about losing this guy’s endowment, right? The whole thing was just roaringly bad. There are ways to save it — you could claim the point of the scene is to contrast Main U Ben with Alt U Ben — unlike his counterpart, Dr Linus is not the super brilliant super schemer, but a sweet and not-that-bright man. But Emerson radiates intelligence, and he can be very kind in the main U as well, so the contrast, if that is what they wanted, fell flat. I think what happened is pretty obvious — the writers wanted a situation in which he made the right choice, chose his daughter over power, and were not particularly concerned with how they got there.

More upsetting in a way is how this horribly written scene is so starkly juxtaposed with the one right after (or before?), one of the show’s best — in which Ben does NOT kill Illana, shows remorse for killing Jacob, cries that The Man in Black is all he has left, and is forgiven. It is just a stunning piece of acting from Emerson who sells the hell out of it, and we are just overjoyed that he will be on Team Jacob, because this gives the character more room to grow, a better chance to redeem himself. (And if O’Quinn and Emerson are on different teams this means each team has a good actor which makes the whole show more watchable — something the first X-Men movie did a great job with: they gave all the good lines to the Shakespearian Actors playing Prof X and Magneto and virtually none to the no name playing Sabertooth, thank god. That decision probably played a part in launching all the superhero movies we have been watching since 2000).

And I DO. NOT. CARE. how many times we have done the slow-mo-long-lost-castaways-are-reunited-on-the-beach-to-Michael-Giacchino’s-score thing. They get me every time, and Giacchino won an Academy Award a few days ago FOR A REASON. This one was no exception, and we have a Sun and Jin one on the way to look forward to. (Lost knows everyone liked the tension of Desmond and Penny separated: I think it was kind of cheap to just do it again with Sun and Jin, but whatever. I can get over it.)

I like the addition of Alpert to Team Jacob, and I hope Lost is ready to deal with the Juliet Problem because that is exactly what Alpert brings with him. The Lost writers liked shaking up the castaways by introducing Juliet Of the Others but were not ready to deal with the fact that the Others were still pretty mysterious — how would they explain why Juliet did not simply spill all the secrets (unsatisfying answer: she just didn’t, or didn’t know that much; also no one bothered to ask her anything penetrating). But this is season 6, and and they may be putting him in there so he CAN answer some things — he already started this episode, talking about his immortality. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Random final thought: Hurley saying “cheese-curds” as he wakes up at the start of this episode is going to have something to do with the Alt U.

Other random final thought: The Bad Guys have a headquarters on HYDRA ISLAND. Kickass.

Also — Miles has Paolo and Nikki’s diamonds. I loved that episode and I am totally glad it got referenced.

Also — Michael Emerson’s “Totally” was the best line of the night.

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In Geoff Klock, Lost