Saturday "Lost" blogging: "Meet Kevin Johnson"
This week's "Lost" episode, "Meet Kevin Johnson," told the story of how Michael ended up as Ben's man on the freighter. As Barry pointed out in comments here, Michael left the island, "found rescue," made it back to New York under an assumed name, tried to kill himself in a car accident, recovered from his injuries, encountered Tom, got hired to work on the freighter, traveled to Fiji, then set off with the rest of the freighter crew toward the island. Since Michael and Walt left the island on Day 67, and Naomi parachuted onto the island on Day 87, that means all of Michael's adventures took place in under 20 days.
Baloney.
During their meeting in New York, Tom told Michael that Widmore staged the Sunda Trench wreckage of Oceanic 815; as proof, he showed Michael a copy of Widmore's purchase order for a 777, and he showed photos of excavated ground that he said were graves in Thailand. He claimed this is where the 300 bodies found in the wreckage came from.
As I've mentioned before, I have a hard time believing wreckage staged in the wrong ocean would fool anybody. Why would Widmore (or anyone else) stage a wreck four or five thousand miles from Oceanic 815's actual flight path? Why would anyone accept as genuine the wreckage of a trans-Pacific flight found in the Indian Ocean? That simply makes no sense to me.
On the freighter, Frank Lapidus said to Michael, "Widmore believes me" about the Sunda Trench wreck being fake. If Widmore actually did stage the wreckage, it seems he'd want Lapidus either dead or too terrified to tell the truth. Frank seemed neither dead nor terrified.
After Michael told Desmond and Sayid the story of how he ended up back on the freighter, and that it was his job to kill everyone on board, Sayid promptly turned him over to the captain and reported what Michael was up to. I probably would have done the same thing. Of all the Losties, Sayid is the one who seems to have the most common sense.
I'm almost certain now that the man in the casket (seen in Jack's flash forward) is Michael. The deceased was someone from New York, and when the funeral director asked Jack if he was friend or family, he replied, "Neither."
Back on the island, Ben sent Rousseau, Alex, and Karl to the Temple for safety; the map he handed them showed the location of the Temple marked with a DHARMA logo. Along the way, Rousseau and Karl ended up being killed by persons unknown. That's a real shame; I always found Rousseau fascinating, in a creepy sort of way.
At the Barracks, Ben said that if Widmore's people managed to capture him, they'd kill everyone on the island. Miles did not contradict him when he said this. That suggests to me that Charlotte and Daniel disabled the poison gas at the Tempest not to save everyone on the island, but to preserve the lives of only Ben and Miles (neither of whom had gas masks at the time).