There are certain truths that every long-time viewer of Lost must accept in order to continue watching the show without wanting to board up your television screen just to stop the annoyingness from seeping into your apartment.
These truths include:
1. Sun, Claire, Charlie, and Kate are in a constant four-way battle to be the most insufferable character.
2. The plotline about the island's mysterious infertility isn't going away, no matter how boring everyone knows it is.
3. The personalities of individual characters can change completely in the span of an episode or two.
4. Smoke monsters exist. They just do. Deal with it.
5. Kate and Jack are in an constant two-way battle for most uninformative flashbacks. During one of their episodes, it helps to pretend that the fact that someone made friends with a grifter once, or got a tattoo when they were living in Thailand is interesting.
6. Juliet might be good or she might be evil, but the one thing we do know about her for sure is that she completely, totally sucks.
7. Ditto for Jack.
8. When the series ends in 2010, everything is not just going to magically make sense. The conclusion will be unsatisfying and incomplete. It just will. Deal with it.
After last night's episode, a new truth can be added to the ever-expanding list:
9. One of the most powerful men on the island is invisible. Yes, invisible.
Seriously. He's invisible. And not in the Ralph Ellison sense of the word, either. He's more the Kevin-Bacon-in-Hollow-Man kind of angry invisible.
I know there's always a measure of disappointment whenever a villain or a monster is revealed after a long, slow, tension-filled build-up. He's never as scary, or as evil, or as awful-looking as you thought he would be. That's a given.
But it's rare that a villain will be less, you know, visible than you imagined he would be. So, congratulations, Lost! I guess you win.