Programming note: Laura “I love Hurley” Dannen had another commitment last night, so once again I’m pinch hitting. I’m like Michael: No matter how badly you want me to stay dead, I just keep popping up!

Before we get this party started, let’s pour out a bottle of MacCutcheon in honor of those who left us last night in “The Candidate”: My heart goes out to the families of Widmore’s men who died defending his sub; they fought valiantly from their treetop perches. Oh, you thought I was going to eulogize Jin and Sun, Sayid, and Lapidus? I wish I could say I welled up when they drowned, exploded, and headbutted the sub door, respectively, but I didn’t. And I’ll tell you why: Their waterlogged swan songs, no doubt, served to warn us that none of our favorite characters is safe from here on out, but with the way those four have been lifelessly shuffling around the island since the season began, they may as well have died six weeks ago. And that’s a four-toed-statue-sized drag. Now, if Jack had ’sploded in the sub, that might have been something. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Mystery #1: What’s Widmore’s motivation? Now that Smokey has definitively revealed his homicidal heart of darkness, there’s only one player left on Mystery Island whose intentions are unclear. Baldie McBadass nabbed all of the candidates, sans Jack, and led them back to his lair on Hydra Island. He claimed he was keeping them safe by taking them back to his compound, but if that was really the case, couldn’t he have, you know, taken them inside the freakin’ compound? Instead, he left them outside in those literal and figurative soul cages that we all remember so well from Season 3, and poor Sawyer didn’t even have time to snarf a fish biscuit before Smokey swooped in to steal them back. So what’s Widmore’s game? I’m not convinced that he’s purely evil, but his intentions aren’t purely altruistic, either; he clearly doesn’t want to let the cork out of the bottle, but my guess is that he’s only worried about what FLocke’s escape might mean for his off-island pursuits.

Mystery #2 What did Sideways Locke see of his island-world adventure? Back in alterna-L.A., Doc Shep saved John after his little…run-in with Desmond, but that wasn’t enough for Mr. Fix-it. While he was digging in the angel hair pasta of Locke’s dural sac, he noticed that the wheelchair-bound groom-to-be might be able to walk again. John was—that’s right—*a candidate* for an experimental spinal surgery. Jack beamed, fulfilled by yet another opportunity to save the day, until Locke said no. Turns out, he’s wracked with guilt after crashing the plane he was piloting and turning his dad—who’s apparently a nice guy, which raises the question, Who screwed with Sawyer’s family—into a veritable vegetable. But while he was recuping, he muttered a couple phrases from his island-life: “Push the button,” and “I wish you’d believed me.” What did he see during his brush with death? Does he know his body’s bound to be the flesh-and-blood vessel of an otherworldly apparition? And does he know that the man offering to patch him up is his spiritual antagonist in another life?

Mystery #3 So, uh, can Jack die after all? For my money, Jack’s wild-eyed, TNT-infused game of Russian roulette with Richard in the hull of the Black Rock was the highlight of this season. The mopey, mop-haired doctor had finally embraced his place in the island’s grand plan and convinced himself he couldn’t die. And he didn’t! So when Smokey slipped some C4 into Jack’s pack and set a trap aboard Widmore’s sub—seriously, who didn’t see that coming?—he kept his cool and told Sawyer to let the explosive’s timer run out. They were candidates; they were bomb-proof. But as Locke learned, faith can only take you so far in this world, and the C4 went off anyway—with Sayid sacrificing himself to save his fellow candidates. (The Iraqi assassin did redeem his weak Season 6 arc, though, by dropping a little science before he died: Desmond’s still alive, and Jack is going to be “it.”) So was Jack wrong all along? Can he kick the bucket? (Just had a thought: Jack said FLocke’s plan must be to trick the castaways into killing each other, so if Sawyer hadn’t tried to diffuse the bomb—in other words, had he not interfered—might it have died like the dynamite in the Black Rock?)

Final thoughts: Jack better bounce back from his post-explosion boo-hoo session on the beach because he still has work to do. (Although if he wants to let Kate bleed out there in the sand, I’m cool with that.) Smokey’s still out there, and with his attempt at sinking all of the remaining candidates foiled, you know he’ll be back with a new plan. But how’s he going to get the them to kill each other? My guess: He’ll convince them that the last man (or woman) standing gets a lifetime supply of Apollo candy bars.