Concluding his six-part interview with Newsarama.com, Moore was asked about the influence authors like Ballard, John Wyndham and John Christopher have had on his writing. His typically intelligent response:

I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another. The Time Machine has chilling visions of the end of the world.

John Wyndham, I can remember reading The Day of the Triffids and finding that a frightening and bleak book – not because of the mobile plants, but because of the chilling picture of a blind humanity and people just reacting with despair.

I remember a sequence in that book where the main character is talking to a blind man, who's been made blind by the comet, and has just gassed his wife and children and is going back upstairs to join them in a few minutes. That was such a bleak vision of how an apocalyptic event would affect people. I suppose I soaked all that stuff up.

There is also a sense of solace in the British apocalyptic tradition, particularly in the works of J.G. Ballard, who sort of suggested that an apocalyptically-changed landscape would create a new psychological landscape that would reveal new states of mind as the water level rose or sank, as the planet turned to jewelry, or massive winds that rendered society unworkable.

All of J.G. Ballard's many apocalypses pointed toward a different consciousness, and I think that's true of many novels that weren't about the apocalypse, such as David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which is mystical, almost indecipherable in places, but is a beautiful, visionary novel that in places seems to suggest a kind of revelatory apocalyptic, almost psychedelic state of mind.

My favorite British apocalyptic novel would have to be William Hope Hodgeson's The House on the Borderland – Hodgeson also created Carnacki in the League, but he also wrote this book, which is kind of an unconventional fantasy story that has got wonderful visions of the end of the universe, not just the world, but the universe. It's got planets with faces on them toppling into this all-devouring black sun, which sounds to me like a very early sort of prescient idea of a black hole.

But I think it just has something to do with the climate of the British Isles more than anything else. (laughs) It probably magnifies by 10 apocalyptic thoughts. But it's a very real tradition, and it's something that's been with me all through my literary development, and when I started to become interested in occult ideas and magic, the two seemed to go very well together, because a lot of magic hinges upon that revelatory moment of apocalypse where consciousness changes and illumination occurs.

Mondo Moore: Questions from Hill, Diaz, and More [Newsarama.com]

We meet four new characters this week, the team that's come to "rescue" the Losties—or kill them, depending on who you believe, not to mention the guns and gas masks the "rescuers" are carrying. Each of these seeming misfits comest with his or her own flashback, so those take up most of the hour. It's not that they aren't interesting, and we learn a lot about how the outside world has reacted to the downing of Flight 815, but it leaves the meat of the episode to the last ten minutes. In the interim, the viewer's head spins with new information, a sensation you either enjoy—or find annoying. TVGuide.com falls into the latter group this week, complaining that characters as "smart" as Jack and Kate should have found out the "answer to the $1 million question" earlier in the show. I've watched enough network TV to realize that's not the way it works, but I'm with Locke: I want answers!

Yeah, I know. That's not the way network TV works—especially Lost.

All in all, I enjoyed the ride this week. Here's what we learned:

• Hurley can see Jacob/Christian's cabin, too, a fact which disturbs Ben and pleases Locke.
  
• Somebody went through a lot of expense and trouble to fake a wreck of Flight 815.
  
• In the past, there was at least one polar bear wandering the Tunisian desert in a Dharma Initiative collar. (A time travel experiment? Evidence of multiple Dharma locations?)
  
• Ben's smart mouth is going to get him killed.
  
• Sawyer, of course, has the best line of the night: "Taller? Like a giant?" I also loved his reference to Locke as Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz.
  
• TVGuide.com also complains that Claire isn't mourning enough. Just because she isn't sitting on the beach in a catatonic state for a days on end, a la Rose, doesn't mean she's not grieving. And I, for one, don't need a soap opera storyline about Claire's sorrow.
  
• Ah, Naomi. You understood Murphy's law but your boss didn't, and now there's a dysfunctional rescue team running around the island without your guidance (unless you turn out to be one of the undead).
  
• Ben's mole on the freighter? Odds are on Michael.

• Are the rescuers angry relatives of slaughtered members of the Dharma Initiative, unknowingly brought together by the creepy Mr. Abbadon for his own nefarious purpose?
  
• Where did the picture of Ben come from? Did he leave the island at some time as an adult—or did someone else carry the photo out?
  
• Is anybody watching Eli Stone? Is it as awful as it looks?