Oh, dear. I guess my pleas that at least a few of the characters not have haunted secrets in their pasts have gone unheeded. It's reaching the point where the eventual answer to the whole Lost mystery had better be something that explains why only fucking crazy people survived the crash, and normal vacationers all croaked.

Commercials. ABC showed Saving Private Ryan uncut for Veteran's Day. Oh, unless your local ABC affiliate opted out because of the very real possibility that the newly-fascist FCC might ding them for a quarter-million-dollar fine. Sorry, viewers in Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit and 61 other markets! Sorry the government has to baby-sit your asses!

Sayid approaches Locke, who's carving a spear with one of his 400 knives. Hey, I bet the election would have been closer if, instead of deploying 10,000 lawyers to battleground states, the Kerry campaign had deployed 400 knives. Sayid asks Locke where he was the night before; Locke says the only witness to his whereabouts was the boar he was skinning. Locke then takes a shot at pinning the blame for Sayid's attack on Sawyer, while also making clear that he doesn't actually know what Sayid was trying to do the previous evening. Sayid says Sawyer couldn't have attacked him, because he set off the bottle rockets right on time. "Unless he found a way to time-delay the fuse on his rocket," Locke blithers. "Anyone who watches television knows how to improvise a slow fuse," he adds. I have a number of responses to this:

1. I watch television, and I don't know how to improvise a slow fuse. Nor do I know how to disarm a missile with a paperclip, or receive a newspaper with tomorrow's headlines on it, or read someone's mind when they're singing.

2. Sawyer improvised a slow fuse that somehow went off perfectly at the moment that Sayid and Shannon set off their bottle rockets?

3. Also, Sawyer managed to slow-fuse his antenna so that Sayid would get signal just before he got clocked?

I like to imagine Sayid is thinking all these things and getting suspicious of Locke, rather than that he is a moron. Locke hands him a knife, "just in case there is a next time."