[caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="135" caption="... to the Crocodile Rock."][/caption] As far as season finales go, this was pretty solid. You can never be completely happy with a show that leaves you for at least seven months with a cliffhanger the size of an atomic bomb, but you can't knock the drama those two hours contained. In this episode we saw:

• Egyptian deities
• Sailing ships
• Gun violence
• Electromagnetism
• A killer fist fight
• A stabbing
• ... and, most important, we saw Jacob.

What does this mean for our dear friends on the island, scattered through time? It means there will be a lot of explanations, but their enemy now is bigger than a mysterious light in a hatch, a group of armed mountain men, a group of armed members of a pseudo-religious semi-cult or a group of armed mercenaries. We aren't sure exactly what they're dealing with, but it's here -- and it might look like dear old John Locke. SPOILERS AND PREDICTIONS AHEAD. I'm not going to offer a recap of the show here, because it's entirely too complicated. Want to know what happens? Watch it on ABC.com. Here's what I took away from the episode, organized into neat little bullet points.

• This is going to become a battle of the Gods. Jacob and his enemy (Thank God for the quick work of the Lostpedia folks)  represent two ancient Egyptian Gods, and Jacob is the good guy. Jacob could very well be the Crocodile-headed god Sobek -- he does live in the statue, after all. Sobek is the god of crocodiles, power, protection and fertility. His rival may be Set, the Jackal-headed god of winds, storms, chaos, evil, darkness, strength, war, conflict, Upper Egypt. They were enemies in mythology, and we've seen Set make a cameo above the grate that the smoke monster came from earlier in the season (I was wrong and called the hieroglyphic Anubis, another dog-headed god. My bad.)

• Jacob's rival was a prisoner. You remember when Locke and Ben went to visit what we've long thought was Jacob's cabin? I'm guessing it wasn't. In this episode we see Ilana -- who we find out is another acolyte of Jacob -- go into the place with gun drawn. Before she goes in, we also notice a break in the ash circle that surrounded the place -- which may have been containing him through some kind of witchcraft. Also, when Locke and Ben visited the place, the invisible figure asked Locke to save him. Which leads us to...

• The rival is a shapeshifter. You aren't the god of Chaos unless you can stir some up. We have every reason to believe that Jacob's rival has somehow taken on the form of John Locke. That means he might also be taking the form of other people who have appeared on the island, some with fatal effect: Christian, Claire, Yemi, Anthony Cooper and Kate's horse. In the case of Yemi, the rival may have caught Eko with the one-two punch as his dead brother and the smoke monster.

• Every little thing is going to be alright. Richard's Latin response to the question, "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" was "He who will save us all." (I didn't know that, but a bunch of these people did.) Paired with Jacob's last words -- "They're coming" -- it makes me think that those survivors stuck in the past (maybe even Juliet) are on their way back to the present to fight the coming war between the gods. Who will be the one to save them all? My guess is still Locke.

OK, that's exhausting. I think I need a seven month break. See you in 2010. Until then, post your thoughts and predictions below.