Every season I get frustrated because I think people make this show far more complicated than it needs to be. The writers tell you everything you need to know. Trust what you see and believe. If you just relax it is all there. I think this gets more and more true as the seasons go on. It isn't real so we do have to suspend reality and believe that anything can happen.
Timeline 1
Flight 815 crashes in 2004 - this is everything we've seen, all the flash backs, all the "flash forwards" off island, all the time traveling back to 1977, the Ajera flight...all of it happened just like we saw it.
When Juliet set off the bomb it created 2 time lines and send the original losties back to the present hence Jacob's "they're coming" as he died. The Original timeline is in present time (2009/2010.) Remember the Losties were off island for nearly 3 years before coming back on the Ajera flight.
Timeline 2 was created when the bomb detonated (sinking the island?). This timeline STARTS at that moment so everything we saw in the original flashbacks could or could not have happened on this timeline. We know anything we saw prior to 1977 happened but after that we don't know yet what did/didn't happen. We pick up this timeline in 2004 when Oceanic 815 lands at LAX.
The producers have called it a 'flash sideways' they aren't completely parallel but enough that we should be able to get the picture.
Patience does pay off because they do answer the questions. They might not be in big flashing letters but the answers are there.
So what did we learn last night? What was answered?
*The smoke monster = the man in black = fLocke, so know we know that the smoke monster can take the form of dead people (Christian, Alex...Claire? Charlie off island?)
*Cindy and the tailie kids have joined and been with the 'others' the entire time (this we really already knew)
*We now know what Richard and the others did to Ben to 'save' him
*We can assume that Richard was a prisoner on the Black Rock. We saw the Black Rock coming to the island while Jacob and the MIB were there. We also saw the the Back Rock had people chained up. We know from fLocke that Richard escaped from the chains. Sometimes 1+1+1 does = 3
What else? What did you guys get that I'm missing?