LOST in Translation V.11

I'm not even going to bother with my requisite spoiler warning. If you haven't watched it yet, I'm sorry, ya'll.

I wanna say something upfront: I love Hurley. I do. But I felt like, if anything, Tuesday's episode made me angry with the writers. SO many things in this episode seemed like the conclusion paragraph of a hastily written research paper: "In conclusion, that's why this happened and how people felt about it and it was a big deal."

I mean, could the revelation about the whispers have felt any more anticlimactic? Things I hated about that moment:

• It involved Michael, possibly my least favorite character on the show ever.
• It didn't really explain why the whispers always came right before Others popped up. Were they warnings?
• Can the other "in-betweens" see each other? Are they talking to each other? Is this like Thornton Wilder's "heaven" in "Our Town"?
• Why can Hurley see them now if he couldn't before? He's always been able to see dead people, so how come this was a magic moment? Did he not see dead people on the island before? What changed?

But anyways. Let's recap the big stuff, shall we?

• Wowza, there goes Ilana in classic Arzt fashion, circa season one. I'm really disappointed we didn't get more about her backstory. Was she as old as she looked? How was she recruited? That felt very unfinished. What I did like about it was Ben's theory: maybe when the Island is finished with people, it's really finished.
• Hurley = The New Locke? Hurley started acting kind of exactly like Locke at the end of season 2 when he started sabotaging any and all plans to get off the island. It's intriguing when we consider that we still aren't sure who's good and who's bad, Jacob or the MiB? Is Jacob sending the dead to have post-mortem chats with Hurley, or are they coming of their own accord? Who the freak knows.
• Blow Up the Plane vs. Don't Do It: I can't seem to give a crap about whether they blow up the plane or not. I feel like the Man in Black would have left the island a long time ago if all he needed was a plane.
• The Well: I liked the tidbit about the well, where Flocke told Desmond that the people who built it were trying to figure out why their compasses would spin. I did NOT like the part where he shoved Desmond in the well, but at least we know he lives on to next week.
• Desmond vs. Locke vs. Jack: WTF, Sideways Desmond? Why are you running over pseudo-happy Locke? Oy. But I liked that kind of delicious moment between Jack and Locke when they met again. It's hard to remember they hadn't seen each other since before Jack became a grizzly bear alcoholic who insisted Locke was right and THEY HAD TO GO BACK, KATE!!! But of course, this isn't Locke, and in a lot of ways, this isn't the same Jack. It's hard to think of them as the same old foes, since one of them, we know, is a little more powerful than mere mortals.

I'm still with them and I still trust this story will unfold as intended. I just thought this episode was super weak. Sure, it was nice to see Hurley finally get his mack on with Libby. But it didn't have the delicious peal-back-the-onion-layers that the Richard and Desmond episodes had. Sigh.