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.

Yeah, but the chair was old and rickety looking, IIRC - I agree that the nursery had been one at one point, but I'm not sure that it was all nice and shiny when Claire was there. Everything just looked to me like it had been in disuse for a much longer time, and that maybe her perceptions weren't really accurate.

Everything just looked to me like it had been in disuse for a much longer time, and that maybe her perceptions weren't really accurate.

Actually it kind of left me with the impression that the designers thought, "Well Claire was kidnapped and taken here last season, and then the Others abandoned it, so we have to make it look like it's been out of use for a long time." Completely forgetting that in show time, that was only a month ago.

The nursery might have been used for Alex when she was a baby, which might explain the old-lookingness of the room, if we accept that the shiny newness of the room was Claire's drug-hazed perception of it.

Ooh, I like that.

And not just because it supports my theory, FTR.