oh no, now my juices for L O S T are starting to boil again, haha.

From watching the clip, we already have another ? that probably won't be answered for along time. But I'm going to guess anyways, since that's part of the fun of watching L O S T.

The obvious choice for the client could be Mr. Widmore. Why is it obvious? Because Sun, now Jin's widow, has turned on her friends and went to Mr. Widmore after they got off the island to offer him help in finding the other survivors.

But I'm not going to say Mr. Widmore, I'm going to say that it's my favorite character on the show and name the client as Benjamin Linus. The only way to get Kate back to the island is to give her a reason to run, and the possibility of losing Aaron is that reason. Did I mention that Aaron is Claire's son, whom is still on the island in lala land?

As I type this, the possibility of Jack being the client came to mind, since he found out about Claire being his half sister when he had the funeral for his dad after he got off the island. But Jack would only do this at the advice of Ben, since Ben told Jack he was going to help him convince Kate to go back.

See how fun that was?

As for the polar bear, I don't think there's a definent answer on that one. Maybe I missed it, but my understanding is that the bears were part of experiments performed by the Dharma group. There were plenty of animals on that island from conservations between the Losties and Ben's group. It was wierd, but that's just part of the show.

felicia - yeah, they explained the polar bear. but you had to keep watching long enough to get that explanation.

mdub, remember the cages sawyer & kate were in? at least sawyer's had been one of the bear cages, they quickly figured out what to push to get food.

now, what the black smoke is...

That's right Ed. Tom told Sawyer that the bears were able to figure out that food dispenser quicker than he was, haha.