Before I get to talking about this amazing episode, an update on what I was talking about earlier in regards to Lost having two more seasons. Turns out it is 3 short seasons, with a total episode order near that of 2 full seasons. 3 more seasons of 16 episodes each, with the final for the 2009/2010 season.
The Man Behind the Curtain was an amazing episode and moves Lost back up the list of best shows on TV, with this and Heroes, they are the best things currently airing new episodes. Lost is back in true form of late, and this may be one of the best yet.
Spoilers will be discussed, so I’ll put things below the break.

Okay, ready? Most of this will be fairly random observations.
Ben saw his dead mother as a child. Richard made a face when he learned of this fact. Ben claims that he can see and hear Jacob, but we have no proof of this yet, as a matter of fact, giving that Ben didn’t seem to hear what Jacob said to Locke suggests that he may indeed not hear Jacob. It may be that Ben saw his mother why he, and not Richard is in charge of the Others, this and his supposed ability to see and talk to Jacob. I am fairly sure seeing his mother and seeing/not seeing Jacob are related. The Others clearly have great hopes in Locke, and Richard’s actions and inactions of late show that support is moving to Locke being the leader rather than Ben. Juliette also mentioned not too long ago that lots of people were unhappy with the way Ben was running things. So I think the Others are hoping Locke sees Jacob. Alex gave Locke the gun in case he did see Jacob, to defend himself from Ben. She was literally saying, if you do see Jacob, you will need the gun to defend himself from Ben.
Speaking of Alex, we saw Rousseau looking at and following Alex not too long ago. Perhaps they had a talk off camera, one that we may see in a flashback yet to come.
Ben became leader of the Others after killing his father (lots of father issues in this show). Locke earned his spot back in the camp after killing his father, or having his father killed anyhow. Is this necessary to lead the Others? Will it matter that Locke wasn’t the one who directly killed his father? I doubt it, since Richard gave Locke Swayer’s folder, which allowed Locke to setup Swayer to kill Locke’s father.
Perhaps the “hostiles,” seeing the smoke monster couldn’t get past the Dharma fence, simply wanted in, and tried to force their way in. The Dharma people took it as an aggressive action and attacked them, causing the “hostiles” to retaliate and escalate the war they had with the Dharma people.
Perhaps Jacob is out of phase with our universe. There are screen caps that show he was there on the chair for a few frames. He looks dressed out of date, but to my eyes, so did Richard when we first saw him in the flashback in this episode. Perhaps they are all descendants of the Black Rock, if not directly from it? Richard didn’t age much from the time Ben was a kid to Ben now. The producers have said time again and again that everything on the show has a scientific or pseudo-scientific explanation, so being out of phase would fit. Also, one of the names of somebody, is an anagram for Lost in Time.
The ash means something, the camera focused on it too long… the ash being the ash Locke noticed while he and Ben were on their way to see Jacob. The initial thought was that it was a spell to keep Jacob in the area, but they talked about a volcano earlier in the episode, so it may be as simple as relating to that.
If the smoke monster isn’t nannite particles as the producers say, perhaps it is a swarm of insects that haven’t been discovered yet. They evolved, in this scenario, with electro magnetic properties/abilities, to cope with the island’s odd electro magnetic properties. This would explain the electrical charges we saw them demonstrating when Echo got a good look at them. They seemed to replay some of Echo’s memories, so perhaps they have a sort of ESP and can pick up on strong emotion. Why the swarm is so hostile remains to be answered, as well as why it seems to be so intelligent for a swarm of insects. Why it would evolve the bio-mechanical sound and roar also would need to be seen yet.
The incident that Dr. Marvin Candle talked about in the orientation video is not the purge we saw in this episode. He made it clear in the orientation video that the incident was related to the pushing of the button. Perhaps he lost his hand when the doors came down in the station during one such incident. Why haven’t we seen a pulse every 108 minutes now that the button isn’t being pressed? Perhaps the station tapped into the island’s magnetic power, and the button was a pressure release valve of sorts, by turning the key, and the station no longer being there, it is no longer building or storing the energy up so it doesn’t need to be worried about… well, at least not from the station point of view. I would think that without the station there, the anomaly is free to wonder and act up on its own.
That is all for now, I am off to eat.