'Lost' - "Confirmed Dead"

Wow ... new people! This was quite the episode and, while it didn't really answer that many questions (except about the new people), it definitely moved things forward. We met the freighter people (Freighties) -- Naomi's crew from the helicopter. Each new person came with some backstory, so I'll go into those first.

Daniel Faraday
Essex, MA: Daniel, a physicist, is watching the news footage of Oceanic 815 discovered underwater. For some unknown reason, he begins to tremble and tear up. When a woman with him asks him why he's so upset, he tells her he doesn't know. As the episode progressed, Daniel proves to be sort of an uncertain, but certainly not evil kind of guy.

Miles Straume
Inglewood, CA: Who you gonna call? Miles is a genuine ghostbuster kind of guy and a thief, too. We see him visit a woman who's grandson was murdered, presumably to remove the haunting and send him on his way. He has a ghostbusing helmet-looking noise-making machine and ends up grabbing the dead grandson's stash o' cash, then sending him on his way. Instead of giving the grandmother the money, he refunds her half of the fee he charged -- giving her a mere hundred bucks. As the show progressed, he proved to be intelligent, yet sneaky and excitable.

Charlotte Lewis
Medinine, Tunisia: Hey, it's a giant polar bear (like in season one) -- or, at least its bones. Charlotte is an anthropologist working on a dig, bribing a local, and she's mesmerized by the news of the sunken Oceanic 815. When she dug up the polar bear's collar, it was the Dharma logo. [Insert Lost clunk here] She smiled. She knows something.

Frank Lapidus
Eleuthera, Bahamas: Ah, he's the one who was supposed to pilot the Oceanic 815 the day it went down. Working as a tour pilot in the Bahamas, he watches a news report on the sunken Oceanic 815 and realizes the pilot pictured underwater dead isn't the pilot (Seth Norris) at all. He called to report it, but doesn't get anywhere. For the Freighties, he's the copter pilot.

The Stuff of the Episode

• There are still two groups, one led by Jack and the other by Locke.
• Jack and Kate, with the help of Sayid and Juliet, took Daniel and Miles (the latter is very uncooperative) to Naomi's body.
• Miles "talked" to Naomi to find out that neither Jack or Kate killed her and he knows there's another group on the island.
• Miles knew that Naomi was in danger when she called him due to a code phrase "tell my sister I love her."
  
• Frank saw a cow. Don't ask me why.
• Jack's bunch found Frank by following a flare he sent up.
• Frank landed the copter, didn't crash it. It still works.
• The Freighties didn't come to rescue the 815 survivors -- they thought they were dead. They came for Ben.
• Naomi was the leader of the crew and her boss was Major Daniels of The Wire ... er, Matthew Abbadon -- the one who visited Hurley in the institution last week.
• Sawyer had reason to beat up Ben twice during the episode.
• Sawyer enjoyed doing that.
  
• Locke's group (with Ben, Sawyer, etc.) snagged Charlotte.
• Ben shot Charlotte.
• She didn't die.
• Sawyer beat Ben.
  
• Locke said a taller Walter warned him that the freighter people were a danger.
• Locke showed them a through and through bullet wound he got when Ben shot him.
• Ben knows all about Charlotte and rattles of a "This is Your Life" bit on her to the amazement of Charlotte and all of the others.
• Ben said he knows it because he has a man on their ship.

Yikes. I can't wait until next week! A mass cover-up of the crash, dead bodies and all? Who would do that? Why? Why is Ben so important to Abbadon's mission? Abbadon doesn't seem to believe there were any survivors of 815 and is solely interested in Ben. Or ...?

I just don't know.