Tuesday's episode of Lost, "Ab Aeterno," was all about Dick Clark Richard Alpert, the ageless wonder who doesn't wear eyeliner and has constantly played coy about what he knows about the island. It was also another entry in the ever-growing tradition of non-traditional Lost episodes that buck their season's storytelling devices.

For me, a break from the side-flashes was more than welcome. Even though I've recently started to warm to these alternate-reality tales, watching "Ab Aeterno" was like reuniting with an old friend thanks to the episode's straight-flashback narrative structure (although conspiracy theorists could reasonably argue that it, too, was a side-flash), which the Lost of old did splendidly.

We were flashed-back (flash-backed?) to Richard's real-time days, when he was an extra in Last of the Mohicans and lived in the Canary Islands in 1867. Things dragged for a bit—Richard had a sick wife, killed a doctor by accident, went to jail, and was sold into slavery, at which point he ended up on the Black Rock, our favorite dynamite-carrying sea vessel—before he was finally rescued by The Man in Black. That's when things really got cookin'.

Because in last night's episode, we learned more than ever before about Jacob and the Man in Black—albeit through unreliable narrators. According to Jacob, he isn't the devil and the Man in Black is pure evil—and being held captive on the island so that his pure badness doesn't "infect" the rest of the world (presumably as has happened with Sayid and Claire). According to Smokey, he's just a dude who wants to be free and Jacob is the Devil. Jacob's conversation with Richard on the beach was a fascinating, and worthy of a transcript: