LOST's Cast Gets, Well, Lost in Tonight’s Episode

We’re only a few episodes away from the end of LOST, so with time short, we’re going to spend tonight’s episode focusing on what’s going on with Jack, Kate, Hurley and Smocke, right? Wrong.

The regular cast takes a break this week for what should be a barnburner – the origin of Jacob and The Man in Black, aka Mr. Smoke Monster. In typical LOST fashion, we don’t expect to learn everything, but we do expect plenty of screen time for both Mark Pellegrino (Jacob), and Titus Wellver (The Man in Black). Oh, and one more thing:

The West Wing’s Allison Janney guest stars as... Someone. Someone close to both Jacob and The Man in Black.

Here’s a little idle fan speculation for you, and like most things LOST, we expect to be way off, but:

• We’re going into the Island’s past.
• We’re meeting a mysterious woman older than both Jacob and Smokey.
• She’s (presumably) not around anymore.

So we’re going to go out on a limb and say Janney is the Eve half of the skeletons found in the cave in season one, probably laying by the body of her husband (Adam). That would make sense, right? If Jacob and Smokey are, essentially, Cain and Abel, then Janney is probably their mother, essentially Eve. And just to be clear, as LOST pulls together tons of strands of mythology, we’re not saying these characters are the Judeo-Christian Cain, Abel and Eve – just that they are likely to have reminiscent qualities.

Some other possibilities:

• LOST turns out to basically be a super long, weird remake of The Blue Lagoon and Janney is in the Brooke Shields role.
• All the characters keep walking across the Island, back and forth, look at each other meaningfully and tell each other they’re not ready to know the truth yet, and then someone hands someone else something mysterious and says they’ll know what it means later, and we learn literally one piece of information during the entire hour, but it never comes to play in the rest of the series.

Just spit-balling here.  So what do you think, Losties? What’s going to happen on tonight’s episode?