Lost Episode 4.04 Citizen Kate by Luhks

The fourth episode of Lost’s Season Four arrives with one of the most puzzling titles to date in the series, Eggtown. Like almost every Lost episode title, Eggtown refers to a number of different things: the eggs in Ben’s breakfast, the Easter eggs to which Locke alludes, the possibility of Kate’s pregnancy, and even an obscure antiquated term used in bargaining. While the title invokes all of these ideas to varying degrees, the title’s most interesting application is to the classic riddle:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Which of these two things is the cause and which is the effect? If every effect in the universe has a cause, then what was the ultimate cause that came before all of those causes? This paradox of causality has persisted throughout history, for everyone from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking. (If you don’t enjoy these types of riddles, then Locke shows us perhaps the only way to escape this endless puzzle: simply eat all of the eggs and kill the chicken.)

Lost Episode 4.03 Truths and Contradictions by Luhks

LOCKE: This is going to be more complicated than we thought. (The Man From Tallahassee)


Every once in a while, a string of Lost episodes comes along that seems to indicate a pretty clear path for the show’s future. Immediately after these stretches, an episode like The Economist comes along and blows those notions to hell. The last three episodes all began to offer us a fairly coherent picture of the Oceanic Six, the Freighter crew, and the overall destiny of the crash survivors. The Economist now presents us an upside-down world in which every assumption becomes false: Sayid now works for Ben, Hurley now cons his friends, and even clocks themselves can no longer be trusted. The title of this episode could not have seemed more innocuous, but, like Sayid, we should have known that ‘Economist’ was merely a euphemism for some far more sinister line of work. Economists work to predict the behavior of large groups of people, and now almost no one in our group of characters (not even Fun-Time Hurley) remains predictable any longer.

Lost Episode 4.02 Snap Judgments by Luhks

WOMAN: Dan, why are you so upset?
DANIEL: I don’t know.


In 2005, social scientist Malcolm Gladwell published a best-selling work of non-fiction entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell’s book explores the phenomenon known as 'thin-slicing', in which a part of the human brain known as the adaptive unconscious can process massive amounts of information instantaneously. In one particular example, months of scientific tests indicated that a statue buried underground was authentic. Despite this evidence, a handful of experts were able to judge that the piece was a fake after only a two-second glance. Those experts, showing an uncanny psychic-like ability, eventually turned out to be correct. Although the elaborate hoax deceived our most advanced technology, it could not slip by the oldest and greatest piece of technology: the human brain. Examples of such amazingly accurate snap judgments in Blink may sound like science-fiction, but all of them are grounded in hard science.

Lost Episode 4.01 The End and the Means by Luhks

It feels like a hundred years ago that we came out here together. How did this happen?

In the closing scenes of the Lost Season Four premiere, The Beginning of the End, a character finally asks a question to which we already know the answer. Any Lost viewer who was eagerly anticipating this episode certainly remembers how it all happened. Most questions posed on the show have never been so straightforward. The first season of Lost began with Charlie’s famous question, “Guys, where are we?”, and it concluded with a question that set the stage for the second season, “What's inside that hatch?”. In turn, Season Two concluded with a question from Michael, which became the focus of Season Three: “Who are you people?”. Despite every revelation on the show, Lost viewers still have no definitive answers to any of those three season-long questions. We know a great deal of information about the island, the hatch, and the Others, but we're still just scratching the surface.