Ben was able to gather some of those who left the island in Lost Season 5 Episode 5. Sun, Jack, and Desmond were with him to meet Faraday’s mother Eloise, though Kate (and by extension Aaron), Sayid, and Hurley were not.
Jack wakes up on the island and hears yelling. He runs to see what’s going on and sees Hurley drowning, so he dives in to get him. Then he sees Kate and wakes her up.
To get to this point we have to go back to the meeting with Eloise. She takes them to the lamp post, which is how the Dharma Initiative found the island.
The room was built over a unique pocket of electromagnetic energy, which connects to other pockets around the world. The people who built the room were only interested in one: the island. They theorized, correctly, that the island was always moving, which explains why they were never rescued (I thought it was because they were 1000 miles off course, kept dying, and were kidnapped and/or tortured at random). The equations tell them where it is going to be at a certain point in time. The windows, while open, provide a route back. Their window closes in 36 hours.
Desmond doesn’t want to go back to the island. He’s just there to deliver a message that Eloise needs to help her son. She tells him that the island isn’t done with him yet. His advice to Jack is to ignore what she has to say, then he leaves.
Flight 316 from LA will go through the window, and they must all get on it. Eloise wants the others to assist in getting everybody back to the island. Otherwise, the result would be… unpredictable.
She’s got a special treat for Jack: John Locke’s suicide note. He’s going to help them get back as a substitute for Christian, which will require Jack to get something of his father’s and give it to Locke. This will produce conditions as close as possible to the original crash.
Jack gets a phone call, and then he goes to meet Ray, his grandfather. He tells him he might be going away for a while, then he finds some shoes in his room, which belonged to his father. Just what he needed.
Then he pays a visit to Kate, who’s decided to go with him to the island. She’ll go with him as long as he never asks her about Aaron again. Apparently, she wants to get back together with him, too.
When Jack went to get his father in Sydney, he didn’t have good shoes, so he just figured he’d put some old white tennis shoes on him because: who will look at his feet anyway?
Ben has been… sidetracked. Code for someone beating the hell out of him from the looks of it. Jack will have to go pick up Locke’s body. On arrival, Jack removes Locke’s shoes and replaces them with his father’s, which he considers crazy but is doing it anyway. He doesn’t care to read the suicide note.
Jack’s at the airport with Locke’s body and sees Kate, then Sun. Sayid walks by, and Hurley’s there, too. Hurley has bought all the seats. 78 of them anyway. He doesn’t want those other people on the plane. They can take the next one. Ben manages to get on the plane in time, showing up with a sling. Hurley doesn’t know why Ben’s there. Ben doesn’t know how Hurley’s there. As for the other people who did manage to get on the plane, Ben doesn’t care what happens to them. Kate tells Jack they’re just all on the same plane… they’re not together.
The captain comes on the radio. It’s a familiar voice, Frank J. Lapidus. Jack wants to talk to him. When he sees who’s on the plane, he realizes something. They’re not going to Guam.
Jack’s got the suicide note back because they found it stuffed in his pocket. He wants to read it now, he thinks. Ben tells him that Locke’s death was not his fault and leaves to give him some privacy. It’s brief: “I wish you had believed.”
Then the plane hits some turbulence. And now it’s time for the plane crash they all intentionally got themselves involved in. There’s a flash, and it’s back to the start of the episode.
So where’s the plane? Sun and Sayid? Ben?
They see the VW bus, and out steps Jin.
Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of Lost Season 5 Episode 7 The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, which airs Wednesday at 9/8c on ABC.