I wondered why the episode was named after a character from the Archie comics until tonight, when I stumbled upon TV.com’s breakdown of the episode:

Forsythe Pendleton “Jughead” Jones III was a regularly featured character in Archie Comics, notable as the lead character in a 1990 cartoon series, Jughead’s Time Police. In the series, Jughead, using a special beanie given by an unknown benefactor, travels through time fixing disturbances in the timeline with the help of one of his own descendants from the 29th century.

Missed that series, but it doesn’t appear to have been on very long. I didn’t realize, however, that alternate universes of one sort or another were extremely common in Archie comics, despite the fact that I loved reading them as a kid.

Chalk up another point in the “alternate reality/time travel” theories to explain wtf is going on.

Before I get to what I believe to be the most interesting and probably accurate Lost theory floating around cyberspace this week, I want to just comment on a few things I noticed in watching Wednesday night:

• If you tell me that your jaw did not drop when Richard Alpert said, “Widmore,” you are frakkin’ lying. That’s it. You’re just a big fat liar, liar pants on fire. It explained so much and yet made it all the more confusing. As usual for Lost, naturally. So, did Widmore have to leave the island? Did he choose to leave the island? Is that blonde chica holding a gun on Faraday Penny’s mom, maybe, and they left because otherwise the baby would have died?

• Did the blonde chica recognize Faraday? Did Alpert? Their initial reactions to him seemed to be that they did, but then they seemed as if they’d never met him before. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to hide that they knew he personally had been to the island before or if they were just assuming he was part of the bad guys (U.S. soldiers, to them). I mean, Faraday doesn’t look like a soldier in any way, shape or form.

• What is Charlotte’s real connection to Faraday? Is she somehow connected to the woman who’s lying in a coma? This is my thought about that (I know I’ve been saying for months that she’s Annie, Ben’s childhood sweetheart, and she still might be, but hear me out) – the guy in Faraday’s lab who chases Des away says that Faraday was trying to send mouse’s brains back into the past. Their brains. So did Faraday somehow transport Theresa’s brain/consciousness into the past or future and it’s somehow in Charlotte, even though she’s unaware? Maybe it suffered some trauma and doesn’t remember him, but he’s in love with her because she’s his lady love. And that could explain why Theresa’s body sometimes comes out of the coma to experience her childhood.

• I don’t think Charlotte’s dead quite yet. I believe her problem, however, is that she doesn’t have a constant. Why are Sawyer and Juliet somehow immune to this problem, however? For Miles, it could be that his ability to commune with the dead somehow makes his brain different and he doesn’t need a constant. Maybe Sawyer and Juliet are each others’ constant?

• Are all the other survivors of the plane crash dead now except for the Oceanic 6, Locke and Sawyer? It certainly appeared that way. Where are Rose and Bernard? Other than them, I can’t really think of any other characters where it matters if they show up again.

• So Locke caused Alpert to show up at the hospital when he was born. Interesting. How does Alpert leave and return to the island so easily? And, this makes it quite clear why he was upset that young John Locke did not pick the compass out of the items he spread in front of him in that “test.” Does that mean that Locke isn’t really the leader of the Others? Has he created a self-fulfilling prophecy? And, could the time loop be as such that he doesn’t remember meeting Alpert when he was a child because he only just now caused that to happen and now he’ll remember it in the future? Of course, that contradicts the mandate that you can’t change the past. Or maybe it’s just significant things that you can’t change, things that would absolutely change the future.

OK, so, I was totally blown away by this theory that Jo from JOpinionated came up with about the bomb. In fact, I won’t do it justice in just a quick summary, so I’m just going to link to it here. I really think she’s on to something. It makes a lot of things make sense – the inability of the Others to have children, having to type numbers in in the Hatch, the explosion of the Swan Station. Curious what y’all think.

Until next week, my friends, I am … so frakkin’ glad Lost, Battlestar Galactica and 24 are back on TV.