I am starting to feel some doubt over our preconceived notions about the others...all of them. How many times have we been shown so far that someone we thought was "bad" was not really? Shannon was not "bad" she was displaying skills she developed in order to survive after being cut off and left to her own after living a sheltered life. Locke was abandoned as a child, then used in a very mean way as an adult by the people that should have loved him the most. He spent most of his life lost, lonely, and feeling unloved. Sawyer was messed up as a child by the actions of a bad man and suffered untold abuse as a child as well as being conned into evil acts as an adult. Danielle is crazed with pain, loss, and loneliness A spoiler suggests that we will soon see both Kate and Ana in different lights..... So this brings me back to what we have seen so far of the others. I can make no excuses so far for the "barefooters" but what about the other ones? Ethan- Ethan wanted Claire, and he fought Jack. He was able to appear and disappear at will. Other than that...we know nothing for sure. We know what the survivors think about Ethan, but we do not know that Ethan was a part of it at all. Now that we know more about the bunkers having "back doors" that can be accessed easily, we can now see how he might have been able to poof in and out of sight so quickly. Now that we have seen a glimps of ,(and a promise of more), the savageness of the barefooters.....is it possible that the actions that we earlier pinned on Ethan could have been them? (Scott/Steve?) I have been pretty much a lone voice in my defense of Ethan from the begining, but with what we have seen recently, I am begining to think that it was the barefooters, not him that has performed the acts that have been attributed to him. I will have to double check the timelines again and compare them to what Ana said about the others attacking them, but from what we have seen so far and the previews for next week...I have to say that it rang a bell for me when I remembered the entire situation surrounding the attack on Claire and the kidnapping/attack on Charlie yet did not seem fitting with the only on screen scenes we have seen of Ethan. The barefooters attacked the camp at night and dragged people off....Clair was attacked at night, and later dragged off. Ethan appeared during the day all times, even said that Claire was to be brought to him the next day, not later that night. The barefooters (according to the tailies) are brute savages and travel in a pack......Ethan was always alone, and the only confrontations we saw him in, he only fought and intimidated and treatened...he did not cause real bodily harm....and it has been summised that C/C were taken by a group, a group savage enough to have tried to hang him and club her in the head. And then there was Cindy....who disappeared at the same gorge (?) that we saw Ethan suddenly appear and disappear at. We do not know that there is not a plant in the tailie group. We do not know just how many different groups of others that there are. We do not know, for sure, which group to assign blame for which act. I'm just starting to take a mental note of all that we have seen just recently and seeing how well they fit with things that we saw last season that we were not so sure of. At this point I am even starting to think that Ethan may be from yet another unseen group of others, or the whisperers, that really didn't mean any harm and was just trying to save Claire.http://www.livejournal.com/community/pondering_lost/90055.html#cutid1