Maybe they were just using it for her. There's a technical term for it--but somewhere that's not their home base, so that she can't track them back to their home base. Once the op is over, they break it down. Use it for some storage, but not much else.

That's fine if the structure is portable, but this one isn't. If it's that expendable, it implies that they have something much better elsewhere.

Or a whole lot of little bunkers.

I liked the ep, but the fact that the beard was fake is sort of bugging me. Actually that's not bugging me in and of itself -- if they want to do some sort of weird raggamuffin pirate schtick to fuck with the poor people who crash landed on their island, for whatever reason, fine.

But the walking half-naked through the jungle with weird cicada noises is making less sense to me now.

What bugs me about the fake beard is it looked nothing like the beard that whatsisname actually had, even allowing for darkness and confusion etc. So are we supposed to believe that that beard was fake, or merely that the island contains the potential for fake beardedness? I mean, why not just grow a beard?

But the walking half-naked through the jungle with weird cicada noises is making less sense to me now.

The JJ-verse(s)? Not so much with the sense making.

Perhaps not all of the Others know they're part of an experiment? Just that the people who are running the virtual rats through an island maze are walking amongst the rats....

If it's that expendable, it implies that they have something much better elsewhere.

Oh, absolutely.

It was permanent, more or less, but I don't think it was that nice. When they showed the nursery, my take was that it was always basically a bare room with some old furniture, and it was Claire's drug-induced haze that transformed it into the room we saw. Could be the same with the whole team of doctors - maybe it was just one or two people doing - I don't know, something - and she morphed it into a lot more than was really there.

So maybe "abandonment" is a stretch - maybe they never used it on a regular basis. Maybe they still do, just not today.

[Locke's] throwing dishes around just didn't feel in-character for me

But he can explode when things don't go his way. We've seen him have his meltdown when his father ("Rampart, emergency!" Sorry, Keven Tigh will always be a paramedic to me) rejected him after bilking his kidney, and also after Boone's death.

The fact that the symbol on the Dharma plaque was the caduceus indicated to me that this was the "medical bunker" or the island hospital. I was really surprised that they abandoned it, and apparently in such a hurry they were knocking over refrigerators.

Unless the abandonment, and the strategically left-behind objects, is another fake set-up to screw with their minds.

But the indication was that the nursery had been one for a while - the cutout cartoon figures on the walls had been there long enough to leave impressions when they were taken down. Unless they went to the trouble of faking that, too.