Okay, ladies and germs, here's the deal. This is my last recap for TWoP for the foreseeable future, because I just got a job which will simply not allow me to spend eight hours a week cracking jokes about J.J. Abrams. (It's totally worth it, though; I'm gonna work on an offshore oil rig!) I've had a great time writing recaps for you, and I'm sorry to be losing such a delightful connection to an attentive, appreciative, and lively audience. I sneak a peek into my praise thread every once in a while (read: ten times a day), and I'm always touched and energized by the nice things you write. Mele kalikimaka and happy holiday-of-choice to all of you. You've been a great audience, so that's why I'm going to include in my final TWoP recap (until my ass gets fired, or blown off in a petroleum explosion) a Sneak Peek Inside the Recapping Process with Dan Kwa.

As always, I spent much of Friday afternoon in front of the TiVo, writing the first draft of the recap. As always, that first draft is plot-heavy and mostly bereft of jokes. So in order to give you, the TWoP customer, the scattershot laff-strewn recap to which your subscription fees entitle you, I am now, as always, editing the recap on Sunday night, totally stinking drunk. I mean, tanked on apple-tinis.

But this time, I'm leaving all my drunken edits in blue, so you can see the magic added to an official TWoP recap through the miracle of alkyhol. Tomorrow morning, before I send the recap in to Sars, I'll remove the more egregious spelling errors and sexist slurs, but for the most part, you'll be seeing this recap as it took shape. Magical!

We open in the Rape Caves. We're just moments after the end of "Raised by Another." Hugo explains to Jack it's Ethan who wasn't on the manifest. Jack can tell something is wrong. He can smell it! It's like a sixth sense! He and Locke go running through the jungle after Charlie and Claire. Exciting jungly music plays as the branches whip by them. It seems as though the trail from the Rape Caves to Midsection Beach is so well-traveled, someone should open up a Vince Lombardi Rest Stop in the middle. Though moving at a full run, Locke spots Claire's backpack twenty feet away on the jungle floor; Jack asks what could have happened to them. I now must issue a mea culpa to the technical staff of Lost; I watched this week's episode at my friends Sean and Jordi's house, and have determined that my criticism of the lighting level of past episodes of Lost was off-base. It turns out that my TV just sucks. Sean and Jordi have a normal, decent TV, and everything was much brighter and clearer on it. Recapping this scene on my television a few days later, I can barely see the backpack, but it was dead evident on their TV. And it turns out not everyone on the show is African-American! Anyways, Locke manages to sort out the three separate sets of footprints in the mud to determine that there was a struggle and Claire and Charlie were taken prisoner. Did anyone read that New Yorker piece last week about INS border agents, in which a good border agent could determine the names and birthdates of every member of a sixteen-person group of illegal border crossers by spotting, like, a Twix wrapper and a bent blade of grass? That's what this episode reminded me of. Except that to get that good at tracking took the INS agents years of daily practice, while Locke had never actually tracked anyone through the wilderness before this, had he? He was too busy getting berated by Dave Grohl. Jack starts calling out for Claire and Charlie, but is shushed by Locke.

Credits and commercials. Hey, Dennis Quaid and Giovanni Ribisi want to tell us about their new movie, "Lost" in the Desert. Giovanni Ribisi would also like you to know he's not actually retarded.

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