LOST

All this time-traveling stuff has officially blown my mind. That said, here are my (somewhat muddled) thoughts going into next week's season 5 finale.

1. The Jughead plot is not going to work. Either it won't detonate, or the detonation won't accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish.

2. Sawyer and Juliette aren't gone for good. They were on their way off the island, but I can't believe that they actually make it somewhere else. Those other people on the submarine get back to the "real world," but I can't believe Sawyer and Juliette are completely out of the picture.

3. Locke has gone off his rocker. I think Ben and Richard are going to take care of him, like kill him or something. I've never been a fan of Locke, and now he seems especially menacing and crazy.

4. Richard Alpert has something up his sleeve. Maybe Richard is Jacob?

5. The cataclysmic incident caused by release of large amounts of electromagnetic energy isn't going to kill everybody. The Dharma Initiative and the Others are still around in the 1990's, because that's when Ben kills them all. So, I don't see why Faraday felt the need to evacuate the island. But a hydrogen bomb explosion. . . well, it would at least give a lot of people cancer and radiation poisoning and cause birth defects in the future. None of which we see in the future Others. Maybe the hydrogen bomb explosion is going to happen, and that's what always happened, and the island is "course-correcting" as it goes along. After all, that's what Eloise told Desmond back in some earlier season: "History always course-corrects," and that's why Charlie had to die.

Whatever happens, it's going to be epic. Setting us up for an epic season 6. Or maybe they're heading for the final scene of the series being a massive shoot-out with everybody dead at the end.