Greatest Hits

Charlie Pace, the former smack-injecting British rocker, entered our lives with one question that still haunts us nearly three years later: "Guys...where are we?" For most of last night's episode, it appeared that Charlie would never get an answer to his inquiry this side of heaven. Desmond had another one of his precognitive "You're gonna die, bruthah" brain farts. And like "Catch-22" a couple weeks ago, the season's penultimate outing toyed wickedly with Charlie's fate with a story that seemed to be barreling toward tragedy. That breathtaking (literally) final scene was amazing and we should all have paramedics and shock paddles ready for next weeks' two-hour season finale. Yes, Charlie ducked the reaper's scythe yet again. But Desmond's prophecy is still very much in play.

"Greatest Hits" totally rocked. It was kind of a reunion show, wasn't it? Lost's curiously mixed third season has inspired a great deal of whining from those bothered by the way it split the castaways into separate subplots. Despite the absence of John Locke — currently pursuing a solo career as a dying holy man in a mass grave of gassed Dharma bums — the gang has been back on the beach for a few weeks now, albeit splintered into bickering, suspicious, secret-keeping factions. This episode finally collected them into a dynamic unit — you know, just like an actual "greatest hits" album. There they were in the opening sequence, the entire frayed Fellowship trekking out into the valley of the foreshadowing of war, led by Jack. Bringing up the rear of this ragtag parade was Charlie, soon to be saddled with an awful task. The episode was heavy with riffs on friendship, heroism, and weighty responsibilities.

The episode was all about the Oceanic 815 castaways' preparation for the mother of all battles with Ben and his barren, baby-hungry Others — a battle over mothers, actually. In the valley, Jack explained the gory game plan: Let the Others storm the beach, let them raid the tents that Juliet will mark with white stones — and then let them find Black Rock dynamite instead of Sun, Kate, or any of the women. It seems Jack and Juliet have been hatching this scheme for days, even enlisting Danielle Rousseau's help in gathering the explosives out of the old slave ship. (Finally, the loony French castaway's actions in "The Brig" are explained.) As he raved about no more running and no more hiding, about one irresistible opportunity to beat Ben at his own 15-moves-ahead chess-playing games, about the chance to expunge once and for all the evildoing terrorists of Quagmire Island, Jack's intensity was more terrifying than inspiring, more obsessive than cool-headed.

Later in the episode, Sayid diagnosed the doctor's problem: Consumed by anger and fear, Jack was more interested in taking down the Others than in getting the castaways off the Island. And the prospect of honest-to-goodness rescue seems to be legit: Sayid believed that Danielle's looping SOS signal was interfering with Naomi's satellite phone; if he could disable the signal, maybe they could make contact with Naomi's ship. But Juliet revealed an additional complication. Apparently, Ben's been jamming the radio tower's frequencies via another Dharma station, this one offshore and underwater, connected at the end of the beach cable that runs into the ocean. Our latest Dharma hatch has the most loaded, imagination-firing name: the Looking Glass. Its logo? A white rabbit, of course! How Alice In Wonderland. A Clue perhaps? "Greatest Hits" also pointed toward another fantasy text that's worthy of investigation, one not as famous yet more explicitly Lost-esque. More on that in a second.

Initially, Jack wasn't interested in Sayid's phone-home pipe dream, especially after hearing from Juliet that the Looking Glass was flooded because of an unspecified "accident" and that swimming down to flip the jamming switch was basically a suicide mission. But he changed his tune once Karl arrived on the beach with a message: Ben had stepped up the invasion plan. The Others were coming. Now. With his intricately designed counterattack ambush suddenly imperiled, Jack realized there might be not be a chance for rescue; the Looking Glass mission would have to be undertaken ASAP.

Which brought Charlie center stage. And by that time, he was ready for the spotlight, as was his actor, Dominic Monaghan, who I thought turned in his best performance yet on Lost. Desmond's latest Charlie-gonna-die vision suggested that he would be the man for the Looking Glass switch-flipping job. In his mind the psychic Scot saw his fellow Brit inside the hatch, surrounded by gunmen, flipping the switch, then — gulp — drowning. He also saw something else, something that upped Charlie's stake in actually allowing events to unfold as predicted: a helicopter, landing on the beach, taking Claire and baby Aaron off the Island. At last, rescue — but per the perplexing cause-and-effect rules of Desmond's future-seeing powers, the dream would only come true if Charlie was willing to play the part of martyr.

And he was. Even before Desmond spelled it out for him, we saw that Charlie had begun to reconcile himself to the idea that fate was hell-bent on calling his number. To that end, he began making a list of his five favorite moments ever — the "Greatest Hits" of his life. It was intended to be a love letter to Claire, but it proved to be so much more. In flashbacks, we saw each of them.

One of them is when he saved a woman from getting mugged. The woman whom Charlie saves is also something of a blast from the (Lost) past: It's Nadia, Sayid's Iraqi lady love, last seen in John Locke's "Daddy made me rip off the Mob" flashback from last season. The lady sure gets around, doesn't she? But why? Is her presence in these past lives purely coincidental or evidence of a divine (or devious) design that links all the castaways? Questions, I think, for another season to answer....

Charlie's most favorite moment, No. 1 on his all-time personal hit parade: his first encounter with Claire, on the night they crashed on the Island. The irony of Charlie's modest list of is that as a reflection of the life he's lived, it doesn't tell the complete story. Like any greatest-hits collection, it ignores all the crappy tunes. But what's interesting is how, in the end, the real Charlie Pace becomes the mythic Charlie Pace of his list. Optimistic. Courageous. Heroic. Ready to sacrifice himself for his family, his community, for total strangers. Ready to take the leap of faith that could end his life. You have to wonder if the Island has something to do with it.

Desmond tried to talk Charlie out of it, even offered to trade places with him — just like the Charles Darnay-Sydney Carton sacrificial swap in Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, which was also the title given to the first episode of this season, a title that, finally, here at the end, really begins to make sense. As Charlie dove into the water and toward his destiny, the famous final lines of the novel came to mind: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known." We watched him as he swam down to the Looking Glass — a stunningly realized, Emmy-worthy triumph of F/X. And just when it seemed Charlie was going to run out of air, he made it to the moon pool of the hulking deep-sea station and discovered air! The place wasn't flooded, after all. (That Ben — such a liar.) But it was staffed with cute girls in jumpsuits with big guns, and as the episode came to a close, they had their weapons trained on Charlie's head, and suddenly we remembered: Desmond's prophecy is still very much in effect.