Where evaluating the episode gets tricky is when you look at it as the capstone to a sprawling, digressive, and epic series that didn’t always seem to know where it was going. It was refreshing that the pre-show series recap didn’t shy away from the many mysteries that were raised and abandoned over the years. By not trying to answer every lingering question, the writers did stay true to delivering a satisfying conclusion for the characters, even though that certainly won’t be enough to satisfy every fan.

2007

One of my gripes with the season-long flash-sideways conceit is that it was never clear to me that anything that happened in the flash-sideways timeline mattered. At one point in the finale, Desmond tells Jack that nothing they do on the Island matters because they will all go to a better place. With the way the episode shakes out, it’s not clear whether Desmond was right or not, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

On the Island, the stakes are laid out pretty quickly: Team Jack and Team Faux-Locke are both looking for Desmond. It turns out Rose and Bernard (with an assist from Vincent) had rescued Desmond from the well, violating their rule against getting involved in the Island’s drama. Since this is LOST and breaking any rule usually ends badly, Faux-Locke promptly shows up and abducts Desmond at knife-point. Thankfully, Rose and Bernard (and Vincent, who was always the only guaranteed survivor) survive the encounter, and Faux-Locke, Desmond, and (a no longer murder-happy) Ben go off in search of adventure.

This trio promptly meets up with Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Hurley.  Gun play ensues before an uneasy truce is called.  Jack and faux Locke both have the same plan – to take Desmond to the magic glowing cave and send him inside.  Faux Locke thinks this will destroy the Island.  Jack thinks this will allow him to kill faux Locke.  Turns out they’re both right.

Meanwhile, Miles and Richard are still determined to carry out Operation Blow Up The Ajira Plane, so they grab a boat and head out to Hydra Island to blow it up. On their way there, they find Lapidus bobbing around in the water offshore. Turns out it takes more than an exploding submarine to kill Lapidus. So now it’s Operation Fly The Plane Off The Island. After much MacGyvering, those three (as well as Sawyer, Kate, and Claire) fly off the Island. It’s a rousing moment on-screen, but as Desmond alludes to– does anything that happens on the Island matter?

So apparently the whole point of having a magic cave that only Desmond could enter was so that the LOST team could recreate the iconic Locke-and-Jack-peering-down-the-hatch moment at the end of Season 1. Once again, it’s Desmond and crazy electromagnetic energy at the bottom of a mysterious subterranean passage.

At the base of the cave we see the light and the water that the Man in Black intended to channel all those years ago. In the middle of a golden pool is a glowing rock. Desmond puts two and two together regarding his purpose here and uses his electromagnetic super powers to wade out to the rock, which he pulls loose from of a hole at the bottom of the pool. The golden light goes out, the water dries up, and the Island begins to shake apart. Feel free to draw your cork and bottle parallels here.

Faux-Locke gloats that he was right and Jack was wrong, but the first of many face punches shows that Faux-Locke is now vulnerable to attack. Lots of punching and stabbing ensues, with Jack getting the worst of it. Fortunately for Jack, Kate turns up to shoot Faux-Locke in a timely fashion, so Jack’s able to be all, “cliff kick!” killing Faux-Locke, though not yet saving the Island.

This is where the episode began to feel a little overcrowded and rushed to me, as some of the on-Island characters split up for the final time. Jack and Kate’s big romantic moment was an eye-roller for me, mainly because I feel like the writers treated it like the central romance on the show that everyone cared about, when most of us are just tired of it. What was a better moment for me was Jack now passing on the role of Island Protector to Hurley (wish I hadn’t given up on that theory so soon), followed by Hurley asking Ben to help him with the job. Ben has done some despicable things on the show, but giving him a moment where he got all he ever really wanted felt right.

Jack swaps places with Desmond at the bottom of the cave, then goes on to replace the rock in the pool, restoring the light and making the water flow again. It isn’t clear how he gets out of the cave, but he does make it back to the bamboo forest where it all began, where he collapses and dies – his eye closing in a reversal of the show’s first image.

2004

So did anything that happened on the Island matter? For that matter, did Juliet blowing up the Hydrogen Bomb do anything but move the characters forward in time? If the flash-sideways was just some sort of purgatory state, how long were they stuck in it? If some of the people died before Jack and some of them died afterwards, why did they all come together at this time and remember their lives so they could move on?

Okay, I’ll try and avoid just spitting out unresolved questions for awhile and just focus on what actually happened in the flash-sideways at the end. Essentially, the flash-sideways sequence was a long string of remembrances as Jin and Sun remember the Island (and English!) and separated lovers like Charlie and Claire, Juliet and Sawyer, and Sayid and… Shannon (?!) were reunited.

For the most part, these reunions served as extended fan service – who wouldn’t want to see Jack heal Locke, Hurley shoot Charlie with a tranquilizer dart, or Kate help Claire deliver Aaron again. The point was for each of them to wake up, with Jack being the final, crucial element to the climactic reunion.

There’s an interesting moment where Hurley and Ben allude to their continued history on the Island, which muddies the chronological waters considerably, but also lets the audience know that the story of the Island continued after all of these familiar characters died or left it. Can we retroactively get rid of a bunch of Kate episodes and show Hurley and Ben running the Island, please?

I was worried that it would be Kate who would jolt Jack fully back to reality, but instead it was his father’s empty coffin, followed by the appearance of Christian Shephard himself. Christian is no longer a smoke monster, now he’s an EXPOSITION MONSTER as he explains that all his friends are gathered together so they can “move on”, presumably to an even more awesome after-life together.

***

So that was LOST. There are mysteries that we’ll never have all the answers to, and in the end I’m pretty okay with that. I’ve heard people complain that the happy afterlife ending was a cop-out, but it provides closure on all the major characters, which is more important to me (and I suspect the show’s writers) than getting all Encyclopedia Brown on us at the end.

I’ll miss watching (and writing about) LOST, and will probably be frustrated when I revisit the show and am reacquainted with the numerous dead-end mysteries, but LOST ended the way most of the episodes do – the reunion scene moved from the beach to a church, all the characters exchanging hugs, not lost, but together.

***

Editor’s note: I would just like to take a moment to thank our resident LOST expert Doug on the amazing job that’s he’s done with these LOST Analysis articles. They took a lot of free time and hard work to put together and have easily become the most anticipated feature we run here at The Geek Generation. I personally couldn’t wait to read Doug’s article every week and I know that there are many fans out there who did the same. I ask that if you are one of these fans, please leave a kind word in the comments below so that Doug will know just how much we appreciate his efforts.

P.S. Since we’re not quite ready to fully let go of LOST just yet, Doug and I will be recording a special podcast looking back on the finale and series as a whole. We hope you’ll tune in.

– Rob

Unfortunately, it looks like it will take until Sunday for sense to be made of the flash-sideways story arc, which only continued to raise more questions. This was a difficult episode to assess, since it mainly read as a prologue to the series finale. The focus was narrowed to a core set of characters, but that was partially accomplished by rather hastily discarding others.

2007

After disappearing weeks ago, Ben, Richard and Miles reappear, still on their mission to fetch C4 from Ben’s old house. When they reach the house, they run into Charles Witmore and Zoe. Witmore claims that Jacob contacted him to bring Desmond back as a fail-safe against Faux-Locke. Of course, we don’t get any details beyond that because Witmore is interrupted first by the appearance of Faux-Locke, then by a chestful of bullets when Ben shoots him.

This close to the end, a bunch of rules seem to be getting thrown out the door. Richard got smoke monstered (to death?) and Ben killed Witmore. Since we never actually knew what the rules were in the first place, does it matter that they’re being violated now? Or is that something that’s going to be shoe-horned into the finale? It gives me a headache.

There’s more deck-clearing when Faux-Locke kills Zoe – another character, like Ilana, who seemed like she might be significant until she was killed off before doing anything relevant – and Miles runs away into the jungle. It was nice to get some wise-cracking out of Miles, and I’m glad they didn’t kill him off, but really – that’s the best the writers could do?

What’s disturbing at this point is Ben’s apparent turn to the dark side. The offer of having the Island to himself wasn’t enough earlier in the season, but it seems to be enough now to make him willing to kill the remaining candidates. Of course, this gets torpedoed when Faux-Locke states his intention to find Desmond and use him to destroy the Island. Is there a reason for Ben to stick with Faux-Locke now? Character motivations are notoriously moving targets on LOST, but the finale really needs to deliver at this point.

Meanwhile, the final batch of candidates (Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sawyer), finally have the sit down we’ve all been waiting for with Jacob. He chose them because they were alone and flawed, like he is, and he needed someone to take his place and do what he can’t bring himself to do – kill his brother.

In the end, Jacob gives each of them the choice to accept the role of Island protector. He wants them to have the choice he never had, but it’s still really no choice at all – since someone needs to take his place or everyone else will die. Of course it’s Jack that accepts. I’ve been as guilty as anyone as far as indulging in various theories regarding who would take over, but it was always Jack. From the moment he took control of the situation on the beach back in the series premiere, it was clear that this is what he’s supposed to do.

Jacob and Jack repeat the ceremony we saw last week, with Jack drinking from a consecrated vessel and Jacob telling him, “Now you’re like me.” Jacob tells Jack that the light cave is just over the ridge from the bamboo forest where Jack first regained consciousness on the Island. Jack insists that there’s nothing there, which implies that the cave is shielded somehow, preventing people from just stumbling upon it.

2004

Over in flash-sideways land, Desmond looks ready to run over Locke all over again when he’s confronted by Ben. Desmond reacts to this in the only reasonable way available to him, by beating Ben about the face and head. This of course leads Ben to flash to the Island reality, which is just what Desmond wanted.

The rest of the flash-sideways business with Ben is a coda to the Ben-centric episode from earlier this season. The show really hammers away at the whole father-daughter dynamic between him and Alex, and we finally get to see what Danielle Rousseau would look like as a middle-aged woman who hadn’t been driven insane by 16 years of isolation on a deserted island. In this episode, the flash-sideways underscored Ben’s desire for revenge against Witmore back on the Island, but with Ben’s increasingly slippery motivations it will be interesting to see if it’s indicative of something else come the finale.

Elsewhere in bizarro LA, Desmond calls Jack to tell him his father’s body has been found (in a ruse that has yet to go anywhere), then confesses his crimes to Sawyer so that he’s thrown in jail with Sayid and Kate. This is all so he can orchestrate an escape (with Hurley’s financial backing) by bribing Ana Lucia (whose appearance shocked nobody who looked at the opening credits) and indebt them to him such that they will do… something for him.

There’s some Jack business as well – a sweetly awkward domestic scene with Claire, the appearance of more mystery injuries first thing in the morning, but nothing really significant until the episode’s close. Locke comes to Jack and finally accepts his offer of surgery, but not before a discussion about fate and coincidence. The Jack-fixing-Locke plot is probably the most compelling one from the flash-sideways, so it will be fascinating to see how it plays out and what (if any) repercussions are felt back on the Island.

So what we’re left with is a reality in which Jack is going to kill Locke, and another in which Jack is going to try and heal Locke. The two timelines need to be reconciled, and as always, I think the Jack-Locke dynamic will be pivotal when we come to The End.

Miscellany

• Lots of variations on old images last night. The episode opens with a close-up on Jack’s eye – but he’s at home, not in the jungle. Also, this time Jack’s stitching Kate up on the beach instead of the other way around.
• Still no Juliet – I figure her for David’s mother. The stupid V stupid season finale was tonight – Elizabeth Mitchell must have been able to get away for at least a scene or two in the LOST finale, right?
• The LOST writers are big fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. SPOILER ALERT FOR THE DARK TOWER. The series concludes with Roland being sent back in time to relive his adventures all over again, while Susannah escapes to an alternate reality where she is reunited with Eddie and Jake, who had died. Is that the meaning of the flash-sideways universe? Will the dead go on to live in an alternate reality while Jack continues to toil on the Island?
• Desmond’s taking Kate to Daniel (Farraday) Witmore’s concert at Dr. Pierre Chang’s museum. Seems to me Eloise is the one who’s going to explain (cosmically speaking) what’s been going on with all this zany reality shifting. Also, this is really the last chance to give us anything more on the DHARMA Initiative.
• Since Ben has had a flash-sideways awakening, will that influence how he acts in the traditional timeline? Flash-sideways Hurley seems to remember everything (check his reaction to Ana Lucia), but there’s no indication that Hurley on the Island is aware of anything.
• No Jin and Sun this week. I still see them showing up again in the finale. Also, we were promised (threatened) with a Shannon appearance this season – is that seriously something that’s going to be crammed into the finale?

I like the sensation of full immersion when an episode of LOST commences without a “Previously on…” segment; they’re plunging in without bothering to foreground any of upcoming action. Last night, that analogy can be taken literally, as the episode begins with a shipwrecked woman bobbing in the water off the Island’s coast.

For a minute, I thought the woman might be the recently detonated Ilana, but it was instead Claudia, the biological mother of Jacob and the still-unnamed Man in Black. She makes it to the shore where she is greeted by Allison Janney, who delivers her babies and promptly kills her.

The fact that Jacob and the Man in Black are brothers came as something of a non-revelation. I can’t think of any hints that were dropped about them being siblings, but the relationship always seemed logical. I don’t think that the clarification does anything other than fill in character history, but at least it should cut down on any Internet speculation that they’re time-traveling versions of whatever marginal LOST characters that people given to wild theories have glommed onto this week.

Even without the presence of our familiar cast of characters and any flashes back, forward, or sideways, this is still very much an episode of LOST. The episode brought up a number of familiar themes, locations, and objects, such as a game of backgammon on the beach, the origin of the frozen donkey wheel and Desmond’s well, as well as repeated references to characters being “special” and the idea of “others” on the Island.

What happened in the episode is secondary to figuring out how it all fits into the mythology that’s been built up over the last six years. On the surface, it’s the story of Jacob and his brother’s arrival on the Island, their upbringing by their mysterious mother, fraternal conflict, and the notion that the Island is home to something special that needs to be protected. When the Man in Black breaks away and threatens the Island, Jacob acts – killing him and taking over as the Island’s protector. It works as a self-contained story, but its significance lies in placing it in the larger mosaic.

Early in the episode, Allison Janney’s character warns Claudia that her questions will lead to even more questions, which is a sort of meta-commentary on the show in general and last night’s episode in particular. We know how Jacob and his brother came to the Island, but we still don’t know how their foster mother came to the Island or was charged with protecting it. For that matter, it still isn’t clear why the Man in Black cannot leave the Island. In the early days of the show, there were references to the smoke monster being a “security system” for the Island, which follows the notion that it was his destiny to protect it. Contra-wise, Jacob explained to Richard that the Island is a cork that keeps the Man in Black’s evil at bay. So, which is it?

LOST has long made a point of being vaguely definitive at best, and the revelation of the golden cave at the heart of the Island – which is apparently key to the existence of life throughout the world – makes it clear that the Island itself is intrinsically “special.” Life, death, and rebirth are explicitly associated with the cave and the energy within, which apparently manifests as the “special electromagnetic properties” that the Dharma Initiative were interested in. We have three and a half hours of television left to see whether or not the Dharma Initiative’s interest in the Island is going to be clarified and explained, but at this point I’m not holding my breath. Maybe it will have to be enough to know that the Island is a special place that draws people to it.

As enjoyable as last night’s episode was to watch, a lot of it felt pretty anti-climactic. I was reminded of Jin’s time travel adventures to the early days of Rousseau’s expedition – as the episode unfolded I already had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen, it was mainly a question of how. For instance, once their mother told Jacob that he couldn’t ever go into the golden cave itself, and that a fate worse than death waited inside, the origin of the smoke monster became pretty clear. That said, the moment where the cave’s light went out and that menacing column of smoke emerged was pretty thrilling.

Ultimately, I think this is an episode that will mean a lot more two weeks from now than it does at the moment. Once LOST has reached its conclusion, we’ll be able to look back at this episode and fit it better into the whole. We’ve taken a break from the show’s key characters and don’t have much time left with them, but the detour was certainly a lot of fun.

Miscellany

• I could’ve done without the replay of Jack, Kate, and Locke discovering “Adam and Eve”. I mean, I get it already. That said, do the LOST writers deserve credit for having the presence of mind to have Locke present in that scene – viewing the corpse of the man who would later wear his face all the way back in Season 1 – or was that just a lucky break?
• The moment where Jacob leaves the bodies of his brother and foster mother in the cave with the bag of black and white stones was another bit that was spoiled for me – the same spoiler I ran across that presaged Jin, Sun, and Sayid’s death also mentioned that the Man in Black and his mother were Adam and Eve. Lousy Internet trolls.
• So where was the statue of Tara-Wet? Or the Temple for that matter? It isn’t clear exactly when Jacob and his brother wound up on the Island, but it had to have at least been post-Middle Ages/Age of Exploration time, right? The only other point of reference we have is Richard’s appearance on the Island somewhere in the mid-19^th century.
• So the dagger that Richard was supposed to use to kill Jacob and Sayid was supposed to use to kill Faux-Locke is… just a dagger? I mean, I guess there’s the significance that the Man in Black used it to kill his mother, but there doesn’t seem to be any other significance to it.
• Based on Jacob’s reaction to his brother’s body at the end of the episode, it seems like he doesn’t have any idea that the black smoke represented a reincarnation. Are we going to see that revelation? Is there time? Does it matter?
• When Jacob pushed his brother’s body into the golden cave, the light appeared to go out. When we saw Ben and Locke down by the frozen donkey wheel (right by the source of the cave) I remember the light being an icy blue. Is the light nearly extinguished, then? Or is this just more of the LOST team making it up as they go along? The Swan station was obviously one of the sources of the electromagnetism that makes up the light, and that was blown up twice already (by Desmond with the fail-safe switch and Juliet with the Hydrogen Bomb) – but obviously there are more sources on the Island, such as the Orchid station. Is the light renewable? Is LOST just a big metaphor for renewable resources?
• Allison Janney chants over a cup of wine (I’m sure Lostpedia will have a full translation) and gives it to Jacob. He drinks and she says that now they are “the same.” I’ll go for the low-hanging fruit here and assume that it means that they both share the sort of limited immortality that keeps them from aging or death by old age, but doesn’t protect them from being stabbed in the chest.
• There was another variation on “the rules” last night – their mother says that she made it so they couldn’t hurt each other, but the how she ensures this is unclear. There was some business in last week’s LOST podcast about whether “the rules” would actually be explained. Damon Lindelof invoked the end of The Matrix Reloaded – was anybody happy when everything was just laid out there? I can content myself with the vague notion that there are rules and leave it at that.
• I can’t remember for sure, but did Richard drink from that bottle of wine before (or after, or at all) Jacob granted him immortality? Seems to me that’s magic immortality wine. Bummer that the Man in Black smashed it when Richard gave it to him. And wasn’t there some business about Hurley and Libby having wine on their picnic that never was? Okay, I’m officially reading too much into this, but it’s all very biblical, isn’t it?
• When Allison Janney makes Jacob drink the magic immortality wine, she tells him that he doesn’t have a choice – so there’s more grist for the free will versus destiny mill.
• Next week’s episode is called “What They Died For”, which I’m guessing will be flash-sidewaysirrific. The alternate Kwons and alternate Sayid will surely be back, but hopefully we’ll get some good on-island action with Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley, as well as the woefully under-seen (this season) Richard, Ben, and Miles.
• The Hurley Bird is about the last zany, out-of-left-field mystery that I’m waiting to have explained. I know there are a ton of other ones out there – which ones do you want to see answered?
• Every time I see a preview for V, all I can think about is how much I want to see Juliet back on LOST. She has to come back one last time, right?
• Seeing a lot of comments around the Internet, it seems like last night’s episode was pretty reviled. I liked it fine, but feel free to tee off on me in the comments.

2007

The episode skipped ahead a few hours from the end of the last episode – from day to night, anyway – with all of the principles gathered on Hydra Island. Faux-Locke has lost most of his following, and only Jack and Sayid are left to help him ostensibly foil Widmore and get everyone off the Island. In short order, Sayid disarms the sonic fence  and Jack (with the smoke monster at his back) rescues Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, Lapidus, Jin, Sun, and Claire from the polar bear cages.

For a show that has increasingly trafficked in ambiguity, the stakes of last night’s episode were refreshingly straightforward – the castaways (with the exception of Jack) are just trying to leave the Island. With all the time-traveling and flashes back, forward, and sideways, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time this seemed to just be a show about a bunch of people stuck on an island and trying to get home.

Jack was always at the forefront of the “we have to get off the Island” movement, but he’s finally learned to let go and embrace whatever strange destiny the Island has in store for him. I’ve really enjoyed the return of the Jack who disappeared somewhere in the middle of the first season; from that point in the middle of this season, we’ve had to deal with a moody, frustrating character who has failed to live up to his initial promise. Now we’re back to the heroic, decisive leader who all the castaways naturally gravitated to back when the Boones, Shannons, and Charlies of the world inhabited the Island.

Last night’s episode returned to the classic LOST theme of misdirection, as Faux-Locke carefully manipulated the last of the Oceanic 815 onto a submarine conveniently rigged with a bomb. I know there’s a lot of debate about how maybe Jacob’s really the evil one and Faux-Locke is just tragically misunderstood, but the most resonant conflict is between the characters we’ve followed since the show began and whatever external forces are threatening them. The old bomb in the backpack trick definitely makes Faux-Locke the bad guy.

Once again, Kate was in a position to bungle things up; she gets shot (yay!), but doesn’t die (boo!), which forces Jack onto the submarine (double boo!). This put Jack right in the middle of the submarine bomb drama, which led to the biggest slaughter of major characters in the show’s run. The show has never been shy about killing off major characters, but we haven’t seen the death of one of the original castaways since Charlie at the end of Season 3 (unless you count redshirts like Neil Frogurt, which I do not).

Sayid hasn’t been quite right all season, and his death happened so quickly and with so little build up that I wasn’t much affected by it. What was more interesting is what Sayid said just before the explosion, telling Jack that Desmond is alive (duh) and where to find him, and also uttering the semi-cryptic line, “It’s going to be you, Jack.”

So this pretty much cinches Jack as Jacob’s replacement, right? I mean, I’ve indulged in speculation about Hurley or even alternate universe Locke being Jacob’s replacement, but it pretty much always had to be Jack, didn’t it?

There really wasn’t time to speculate much on Sayid’s final words, as emotion quickly trumped mystery – not something this show has done well in the past. I spent the bulk of the season waiting for Jin and Sun to be reunited, and almost perversely, they were back together for barely an episode. It’s a credit to the actors that Jin’s refusal to leave Sun never descended into melodrama. It was the kind of scene that, if done poorly, leaves you rolling your eyes, and if done well, leaves you dabbing at them. Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim achieved the latter.

What made the sequence even more affecting was Jin and Sawyer’s obvious affection for each other – Sawyer’s willingness to go back for Jin and Jin’s concern about Sawyer being knocked unconscious was played with great sincerity. LOST has done a great job of developing male friendships (Jin and Sawyer, Sawyer and Jack) and it all really paid off last night.

The 2007 sequence ended with Faux-Locke on the beach with (a reluctant) Claire in tow. He says he needs to finish what he started, which I think means bad news for Widmore first, though I’m sure Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley have reason to worry as well.

2004

Hey everybody, it’s Bernard! I don’t know about y’all, but the way he casually remembered Jack, the flight, John Locke, and Anthony Cooper, implied to me that ol’ Bernie had a pretty good idea that the whole everyone-connected-by-Oceanic-815-coincidence was more than it seemed. Was he shown something by Desmond, perhaps?

The episode does resolve the mystery of alternate Locke’s alternate paralysis – a plane crash that also incapacitated his father, Kevin Tighe’s Anthony Cooper – which wasn’t the most compelling mystery the show needed to resolve, but it was nice to get an answer. The great intrigue, of course, was Locke’s fevered rambling – all button-pushing and belief – suggesting that he is conscious, on some level, of the original timeline.

Beyond the fan service of additional Helen (the marvelous Katey Segal) scenes, the flash-sideways was about building character relationships. Ever since I jumped to the conclusion back in Season 2 that Jack and Claire were siblings, I’ve been waiting for them to have a great brother-sister moment. That hasn’t happened on the Island, but there was the nicely heartwarming scene in which  Jack invited Claire to stay with him.

What really resonated in the flash-sideways was the back-and-forth between Jack and Locke. For years, we’ve watched the increasingly loud disagreements between Jack and Locke’s philosophies. Traditionally, Locke is the one doing the persuading, only to be stopped short by Jack’s refusal to believe. Here, when Jack is trying to convince Locke to go through with experimental surgery, we see them playing the opposite roles, and without the desperate, over-the-top emoting we’ve seen in the past, just quiet urging and grim refusal.

Miscellany

• Thematically, I like Sawyer’s decision to pull the wires on the bomb. If the watch had run down and not exploded – proving Jack right – any ambiguity surrounding divine protection of these characters would have been erased.
• It was hard to tell, but it looked like Lapidus died, too. I’m sorry to see Frank go – it never seemed like he was used up to his potential, though there really isn’t any time left to do much more with the character. The Freighties all have fallen victim to the shorter episode runs (particularly the strike-shortened Season 4) that characterized the latter seasons of LOST.
• Just as I was recovering from the gut punch of Jin and Sun’s death, Hurley breaks down at the news. I don’t think they ever showed him cry over Libby or Charlie, and that choked sob from the character that has been described as the heart of the show played to some pretty raw emotional spots.
• The appearance of Jin at the hospital at the end of the flash-sideways is a reminder that the characters we’ve lost on the Island all live on in another way, but that doesn’t really blunt the impact of what happened to Jin and Sun beneath the sea.
• Next week is the episode that’s going to delineate the conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black. I like that they chose to demonstrate that by showing old footage relating to this and showed little (if any) new footage.
• Beware of online spoilers. In the comments section of a podcast completely unrelated to LOST, I read that Jin, Sun, and Sayid would die this week (as well as a couple of other things that didn’t happen and which I won’t pass along) and apparently six pages from the series finale have been leaked – pages that would pretty much ruin the suspense of the finale. It’s never come up in our comments section, but if you know any spoilers for the remainder of the show, please keep them to yourself.
• I watched the first episode of Happy Town last week, and in the interest of having another labyrinthine, ABC-produced mystery show to write about on a regular basis, I’m going to start writing about it here. Look for a double review of both the series premiere and this week’s episode later this week.

Most Season 6 episodes, I’ve been checking the clock disappointed by how little has happened. Last night, I couldn’t believe how much had happened with a ton of episode left to go. I about burned up my notepad taking notes, always worried that I’d miss something while I was jotting down what had just happened.

Last night’s episode had a lot going on, so let’s get to it.

2004

In a thankful change from most of this season, this episode didn’t spend a lot of time in 2004, and what time it did spend was fairly significant. I won’t say that all the dangling plot threads were tied up, but they were certainly gathered together.

The only Ben action we got the whole evening was him riding in the ambulance with Locke. Locke made a point of mentioning that he was going to get married to Helen Norwood, which is either crazy-I’m-about-to-die talk, or he really lost the erstwhile Peggy Bundy once again. The final sequence of the flash-sideways finds him on the operating table with Jack about to go into action – moments before Faux-Locke saves regular timeline Jack from getting blown up. So, that’s exhausting to think about.

What else? Claire’s all set to give up her baby when Desmond sweeps in and brings her to Ilana, Attorney-at-law. I’d forgotten about the revelation that Christian Shephard had an illegitimate Australian daughter earlier in the season, but thematically it fit the notion of reunion that ran throughout the episode.

Sawyer found himself in the middle of a lot of business – talking to the recently arrested Kate and arresting the murderous Sayid. The explanation for why he didn’t arrest Kate in the season premiere – that he didn’t want people to know he’d been in Australia – works better on paper than it did in execution, but at least they’ve tied that up.

Jack continues to enjoy the healthier father and son relationship he established with his son David at the end of his flash-sideways episode. Life doesn’t seem to be that much better for anybody in the flash-sideways universe, but at least Jack has the kind of father-son relationship he always wanted with his own father.

Rounding out the flash-sideways wrap-up, Sun and child are a-okay, even if she did have a freak out recognizing Locke when they were being taken into the hospital. Unfortunately, the happily-ever-after seems premature for the Kwons (in both timelines) so I’m sure they’ll be jerked around a bit more before the show ends. Still, it’s nice to enjoy them in a happy and healthy moment.

2007

I’ll try to get to it in the comments section, but I found the normal timeline section of last night’s episode to be incredibly rich in potentially iconic quotes. I was all set to start off this review with a quote (as I did at the beginning of the season) but was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of quotable material. This was a walking-around-the-island episode, but unlike a lot of episodes where nothing more than geographical maneuvering happens, the characters were put in damn interesting places for the lead up to the finale.

With the benefit of hindsight and critical interpretation, LOST is a show about destiny versus free will. For much of the show’s run, those two competing ideologies have been embodied by Locke and Jack. With the real Locke dead, and Jack embracing the concept of destiny, that overarching conflict is gone. But all it really takes is Terry O’Quinn and Matthew Fox in a torchlit jungle to bring it all rushing back. Again, this show is supposed to be more about character than mythology, so the dynamic between Jack and the man who wears Locke’s face is more interesting to me than corks, candidates, and constants.

Last night’s episode featured one of my favorite LOST tropes, which is Sawyer attempting to be heroic but failing because of circumstances beyond his control. I mean, there isn’t anything not to like about Sawyer manipulating circumstances to get himself, Kate, Jack, Frank, Sun, and Hurley to Hydra Island so they can get off The Island for good. He moves quickly, talking to people as necessary, and gets them to where they need to be until Jack throws the situation out of whack.

I’ve always been touched by the moment late in Season 2 where Sawyer tells Jack that he’s the closest thing he has to a friend on The Island – despite their myriad conflicts, there’s a great bond there, so it was nice to see that dynamic in play again. When Sawyer told Jack to get off his boat (and I totally kept thinking of Harrison Ford in Airforce One – GET OFF MY PLANE!), I couldn’t be angry at either character. Both of them were doing what they thought was right. Jack is still embracing Locke’s old concept of destiny, even though Faux-Locke told him it was a sham. They’re both on redemption quests, it’s just that their paths run at cross-purposes right now.

The appearance of Tina Fey’s homely stand-in (Zoe) gets a lot of the action going. Charles Witmore wants Desmond back, and is willing to blow up Faux-Locke and all his followers to get what he wants. I know there’s a running theory that Witmore just wants control of The Island so he can make money off of it, but how lame is that? Either way, he’s pretty intent on taking it.

Faux-Locke’s reaction to Witmore’s threat is to have Sayid kill Desmond. We see Sayid go to the well where Faux-Locke left him last episode with a gun. The two talk and Sayid comes back all, “Yeah, I totes killed Des,” which I don’t know why Faux-Locke’d believe that because I sure as hell didn’t.

The episode ended all Lou Ferrigno. We finally got the Jin-Sun reunion, and after Zoe told Sawyer and company that “the deal is off”, she orders an artillery barrage on The Island. The various red shirts in Faux-Locke’s retinue get blown up real bad, but Faux-Locke saves Jack. The episode managed to combine the emotional wallop of the Kwons with a big action set piece, which is pretty hard to pull off, but they did it. At the end, Faux-Locke tells Jack, “You’re with me now.”

So Jack appears to be the titular “last recruit”, but we don’t know what anything means at this point. I think Season 6 spent a little too much time spinning its wheels Season 3-style, but as I’ve said before, we’re just barreling forward to the conclusion now. Strap in, bitches.

Miscellany

• So my big theory is that Locke will be the one who takes over for Jacob. Yes, regular timeline Locke is dead, but there’s always alternate reality Locke and also, THIS IS A SHOW ABOUT A MAGICAL TIME TRAVEL ISLAND.
• Does anybody remember the Hurley Bird? You know, the primeval looking thing that showed up a couple of times a few seasons back, buzzed our heroes and apparently screeched the name “Hurley”. Seemed like last week was the episode where they’d explain that, isn’t it? Also, are we ever going to find out how Hugo Reyes came to be nicknamed Hurley? Back in Season 1 he said it’s something that he didn’t want to get into, but for goodness sake, we’ve had a whole episode about Jack’s tattoos in that time.
• “I think we have some catching up to do.”
• So…Faux-Locke was the specter of Jack’s dad during the earlier seasons. I’m a little disappointed – it seemed to me like the show could do more interesting things with the idea of Christian’s smarmy ghost than him just being another form for Smokey to take.
• “It’s so nice to have everyone back together again.”
• I’ll admit I blinked when gun-toting Claire approached the boat. As much as I dislike Kate, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the scene if it ended with Claire killing Kate when she was trying to be all nice and stuff. Don’t get me wrong, Kate still sucks.
• A disadvantage of watching the show as it unfolds on television as opposed to consuming it all at once on DVD is that Jack’s apology to Sawyer for Juliet’s death didn’t really resonate. I mean, Sawyer seems to be drinking the Kate Kool-Aid again, so a lot of that emotional resonance has evaporated.
• When Jin and Sun had their reunion embrace, one of the big sonic pylons was conspicuously between them and the camera. I was worried one of them was going to get zapped. I’m not even kidding, I might’ve bailed on the rest of LOST if that’d happened.
• Sayid talks to Desmond about losing the woman he loves and then we get a Nadia scene. I like it, but I know Shannon is supposed to come back at some point this season, and Sayid’s love of Shannon has always seemed out of character to me. My guess is that ghost Shannon will show up on the Island to knock Zombie Sayid back to Heroic (Yet Tortured) Sayid before it’s all over.
• The next big reveal I’m waiting for is the return of Juliet. I mean, V has been pretty terrible, so let’s give Elizabeth Mitchell something worth doing.
• So that was totally the voice of Don Draper in the Mercedes commercial, right?

2004

For purely sentimental reasons, this episode might be my favorite episode ever, and it all comes down to seeing Cynthia Watros’ name in the opening credits. As intriguing as Mr. Eko was, Libby was my favorite Tailie, and her blossoming romance with Hurley in Season 2 was a welcome, gentle aside on a show that is often preoccupied with weightier concerns. The reveal of Libby at the end of the Season 2 episode “Dave” was a great stinger, and it seemed like there was a back story worth exploring there – certainly one more interesting than say, Jack’s tattoos, Charlie’s piano, or Kate’s short-lived marriage to Captain Mal Reynolds.

Then Michael went and shot Libby and that plot thread was cut off, seemingly forever. For years, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof insisted that Libby’s story was over and they wouldn’t return to it. Thankfully, the LOST brain trust has proven susceptible to fan pressure (see the case of Nikki and Paulo) and those of us who have been crushed by Libby’s death years ago were finally rewarded.

The episode gave me chills right off the bat with Dr. Pierre Chang’s sonorous introduction of Hugo Reyes, businessman and philanthropist. It didn’t take long for me to get a lump in my throat when Libby (not Rosalita) approached him at the restaurant where he was awaiting a blind date.

At this point, the show is committed to blending the two realities, as Libby tells Hurley that she knows him from somewhere, that they have a connection, and that – oh wait, she’s crazy ‘cuz here comes Dr. Senator Kelly to take her back to the crazy place.

My least favorite moment of the episode came when Hugo made for one of his chicken restaurants, ordered a family-size bucket of chicken, and chowed down because fatty-sad-eats-a-lot. Fortunately, the moment was short-lived, as Desmond showed up, struck up a conversation, and steered Hurley back towards Libby.

Hurley goes to the mental hospital to see Libby (greasing the wheels with a generous donation) and then the two finally go on their beach date (thankfully, she was not shot while fetching blankets this time). There’s something of a re-hash of their why-would-you-like-me conversation from Season 2, and this time when they kiss…Hurley starts remembering things. Island things.

As they kiss, Desmond watches from a distance, which isn’t that creepy. Then he goes to the school where Ben and Locke work and just hangs out, which Ben thinks is pretty creepy. Then he straight RUNS LOCKE OVER, which I guess will at the very least have the effect of bringing AlternaLocke and Bizzaro Jack together, right?

Speaking of which…

2007

Michael almost always spoke in this kinda irritating, scolding manner – especially when he just wanted to get his boy back. Ghost Michael isn’t much different, and makes a point of telling Hurley that if he doesn’t change Richard and Ilana’s crazy ways, everyone is going to die and it’s going to be his fault.

Richard’s purpose right now is to blow up Ajira 316 to keep Faux-Locke from getting off the Island. Fortunately, his ride to the Island is still full of dynamite, so Ilana heads to the Black Rock to get some. Hurley tries to dissuade everyone else from this course of action, and Ilana makes a big speech before going all Dr. Arzt and exploding everywhere.

Hurley apparently has a change of heart and heads over to the Black Rock to get more dynamite. Hugo somehow manages to get ahead of the group and blows up the Black Rock and all the dynamite on it before anyone else can get there.

Then, the breaking of the fellowship. Miles and Ben go with Richard to the old Dharma barracks for heavy artillery. Hurley takes Jack, Frank, and Sun with him to talk to Faux-Locke. Hugo lies to try and convince everyone to come with him, saying that Jacob is telling him what to do, but Richard points out that Jacob never tells anyone what to do and goes off to do that whole find-a-bunch-of-guns-and-grenades thing.

As they get closer to Locke’s camp, it becomes clear that Hurley is thinking for himself – he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, but he feels like it’s a good idea and is going with it. When he confesses to Jack, the good doctor surprises him by saying that he knew Hurley was lying but that he trusts Hurley and needs to learn to let go. Jack seems to be happily tripping along on the notion of going with the flow of destiny until he goes all “Jack face” at the sight of Faux-Locke near the episode’s conclusion.

Of course, Faux-Locke was doing more than just waiting for these guys to show up. He had to have a heart-to-heart with Desmond first, talking about the energy on the Island, asking him about his lack of fear, and then straight throwing him down a well. This makes Desmond’s decision to run Locke over in the flash-sideways a lot more reasonable, huh?

My guess is that the Island still isn’t done with Desmond, and even though he’s at the bottom of a very deep well, we’ll be seeing more of him on the Island, and not just in the flash-sideways universe. It was a moment that seemed certain to happen, but was still a little shocking to see.

A friend of mine suggested that Hurley is the candidate most likely to replace Jacob, especially given his caretaker role in the flash-sideways world. I liked the theory when I heard it a couple of months ago, and it’s grown on me even more since then. The way he was positioned last night – becoming aware of the parallel reality in 2004 and taking a leadership role in 2007 – makes me like that theory even more. If the next four episodes (plus the finale) are like last night’s episode, we’re in for a fun ride.

Miscellany

• So the whispers in the jungle were finally explained. Like Michael, they’re ghosts of the Island who can’t move on because of what they’ve done. So I guess the Island is kinda purgatory, right? Considering the whispers haven’t been important since (maybe) Season 3, it kinda feels like the LOST writers have a punch list of mysteries they need to wrap up and this was one of them. It wasn’t a bad explanation, it’s just that the whisper mystery has been eclipsed by so many other factors it’s hard to care about now. Of course, I guess this means if I go back and re-watch LOST from beginning to end, I won’t be able to be all, “Hey! They never explained what was up with those whispers!”
• So we know Ilana had trained her whole life to protect the candidates, but I don’t reckon we’re getting her origin story now.
• As with Desmond at the well, they kind of telegraphed the dynamite explosion, but it was like a split-second before it happened, so I’m not knocking it.
• Ben on Ilana, “The Island was done with her. Makes me wonder what will happen when it’s done with us.”
• What was the bag Hurley found before he appeared to change his mind on the dynamite plan? Was it the diamond bag, or is there some larger significance to it? Black and white rocks? Backgammon pieces?
• Miles brings up an interesting point – should Hurley really be doing what every dead person tells him to do?
• Locke apparently needs everyone who came together to leave together. Conveniently, his missing pieces walked into his camp. Now we’ll see some free will versus destiny business, right?
• Desmond tells alternate Ben that his son’s name is Charlie so fast that he has to be sharing consciousness with himself across realities, right?
• Locke is once again followed by a mystery boy in the woods. This one looked different to me than the one we saw before, but I’m sure the Internet will tell me if I’m wrong.
• Another “Son of a bitch!” by Sawyer for the YouTube compilation.

The implied temptation of Sun by faux-Locke made me nervous because, while giving the character a feature episode, it seemed like just another way to isolate her from the main cast. Also, I wasn’t looking forward to a flash-sideways of old-school Jin and Sun – not because I don’t like reading subtitles, but because Jerk Jin and Submissive Sun are not as interesting as the characters they have become.

2007

Not a lot of slack in the traditional timeline this week. Hurley, Ben, Lapidus, and Ilana were all pretty under-utilized, but there was enough going on elsewhere to make up for it. In faux-Locke’s camp, Sayid is utterly devoid of emotion and Jin misses his wife. When Locke goes out on a field trip, Widmore’s men raid the camp, knocking everyone out with tranquilizer darts and taking Jin with them.

When faux-Locke returns, he grabs Sayid and heads for Hydra Island to have a little face time with Widmore. A couple of massively important points are laid out here: First of all, this is the first meeting of Widmore and faux-Locke, and they are definitely not on the same side. Sorry, the Internet, Widmore and faux-Locke are not in cahoots. The other massive revelation is that the “war” that Widmore warned of is officially on – and it looks like it’s going to be faux-Locke versus Widmore with the fate of the world at stake.

Nope, that last bit wasn’t hyperbole. Widmore explains to Jin that letting faux-Locke off the Island would make everyone else “cease to exist”. LOST is usually pretty careful with word choice, so I have to believe that the phrase “cease to exist” is not just a poetic way of saying that everyone dies. Does this mean, as a friend of mine has suggested, that the flash-sideways reality shows what the world would be like if faux-Locke got off the Island? I’m not ruling it out, but that world doesn’t seem to be much worse for anybody than their pre-Island lives were.

A sure sign that we’re getting close to the end is how quickly new questions are being answered. While we still have no clue how the hell Anthony Cooper got to the Island, the “package”, a.k.a. the mystery behind the padlocked door is revealed to be Desmond. Considering Henry Ian Cusick’s name has been in the opening titles all season, his reappearance is like the anti-climax of Michael’s return in Season 4, but it’s nice to finally see him.

Meanwhile, on the beach, Sun hits her head and forgets how to speak English (seriously) while everyone waits around for Richard to come back and tell them what to do. When Richard returns, he’s all, “Let’s go to Hydra Island and get rid of that plane,” which Sun (who still understands English) is less than thrilled about.

What eventually settles Sun down is Jack, who is riding the destiny train to work these days, and who has returned to the quiet, confident, heroic Jack that we saw early in the show’s run, instead of the erratic Jack who characterized the show’s middle and late periods. I don’t think Jack’s group will wind up allies with one side or the other here – I think the “war” between Widmore and faux-Locke is just a cover from the more important tasks the core characters have in front of them.

2004

The flash-sideways answered the question of how Jin got in the freezer, but we didn’t learn much about the aftermath. In the flash-sideways, Jin still works for Mr. Paik, but he and Sun are not married – he has ostensibly accompanied her to LA to be her bodyguard – though they are carrying on a secret affair.

In the show’s traditional history, Jin went to work for Mr. Paik as part of the wooing process, so his flash-sideways employment came by other means. While Sun’s father extended a measure of gruff acceptance to Jin in the main timeline, here he has a hands-off-the-daughter policy, which Jin has violated. The purpose of delivering the watch and the $25,000 is so that Keamy can whack Jin.

Despite what was seen in the season premiere, flash-sideways Jin and Sun are not as jerky and submissive as they were in the early days of the show. Jin is still protective, but sensitive, while Sun’s self-confidence is much higher. The other big difference is that Jin isn’t shooting blanks off-Island in this reality, as she reveals herself to be pregnant (after being shot in the abdomen) at the conclusion of the flash-sideways.

I’ve been pining for the Jin-Sun reunion all season, so I’ll take this compromise for now. Sun’s heading to Hydra Island now, so their “for real” reunion is drawing closer, but there will likely be a few more obstacles in the way.

Miscellany

• I was a little disoriented by the scene with Jin in Room 23 – I kept waiting to see him in a big walk-in freezer in the flash-sideways, so for a second I thought that’s where the brainwashing video and Zoe were hanging out. The room famously held Alex’s boyfriend and Walt, and Zoe explains that it was used in Dharma experiments. Is this just a callback to something earlier, or are we going to learn more about the purpose of the room and Ben’s post-purge use of it?
• Nice to see Sun’s old garden again. I’ve mentioned this before, but after the relative chaos of Seasons 4 and 5, I enjoy seeing the old familiar places.
• It did seem a little incongruous that Ben was the one who found Sun – it seemed like such a Jack scene. Was the fact that Ilana didn’t believe his story supposed to be comic? If so, the joke fell flat.
• Last season, Sawyer mentioned that Jin was mapping the Island grid by grid to find Rose and Bernard. Zoe mentions something about geothermic activity and the fact that she’s a geophysicist. There’s been rumors about a volcano on the Island for awhile now – is Widmore planning on keeping faux-Lock contained Pompei-style?
• So… faux-Locke pretty much told Claire she could kill Kate later, right?
• The line about faux-Locke not being able to smoke monster his way over the water got me thinking… why not make “Smoke on the Water” his official outrigger theme song?
• Mikhail has two eyes right up until he’s killed, then it’s back to the old-school cyclops look. Any chance we’ll ever hear anything more about the glass eye the Tailies found?
• Usually Hurley is the one who says whatever the audience is thinking, tonight it was Miles piping up about the unlikely bump-on-the-head-forget-how-to-speak-English scenario. Is this the flash-sideways moment bleeding into the traditional timeline? Sun’s mirror moment seemed more pronounced than everyone else’s so far.
• Lapidus misses bacon – always knew I liked Frank.
• Daniel Dae Kim’s reaction to seeing pictures of his daughter for the first time was pretty great – emotional yet understated.
• So at the end of the episode by the submarine, do you think the script actually read, Sayid emerges from the water like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now?
• They blared bagpipe music throughout the teaser for next week’s episode. Can we count on that for next week, too? Do we get flash-sideways Desmond, or time-tripping Desmond? I’m way hoping it’s time-tripping Desmond.

Very quietly, Season 6 appears to be hitting its stride. After a terrific Ben episode and a strong Sawyer episode, we get Richard’s long-awaited origin story. The broad strokes had already been guessed at by most LOST viewers, and the writers wisely used the story as a backdrop to further elucidate the conflict that is taking shape.

Richard has been one of the quieter mysteries of the Island. His presence has always been benign, even when he’s been working alongside some of the less savory elements among the Others. The mystery surrounding his eternal youth has somewhat obscured the deeper mystery around the character, namely: What is his role on the Island?

Before we get the answer to that question, we go back to the Canary Islands, circa 1867 where Richard’s wife Isabella has fallen ill. Having seen the episode play out, it’s difficult to decide if the drawn out sequence involving the illness, Richard’s frantic ride to find a doctor, and the doctor’s indifference was padding or misdirection. In the fan/critical community, Richard’s arrival on the Island has been tied to the Black Rock for some time now, but over the course of that sequence, I kept waiting for Jacob to show up to tell Richard that he could save his wife but he’d never be able to see her again.

Of course, that didn’t happen, as Richard found himself saved from the gallows, sold into slavery, and shipwrecked on the Island. The episode spent a lot of time with Richard chained below decks on the boat, struggling to get out before the Man in Black comes to set him free. While Nestor Cabonell did a fine job portraying the character’s desperation, there was a point about two-thirds of the way through the episode that it seemed like we weren’t going to get any answers.

Ultimately, the Man in Black convinces Richard that Jacob is the devil, and gives him the same knife and instructions that Dogen gave Sayid a few episodes earlier. While Sayid was able to stab faux-Locke, Richard is surprised by a surprisingly vigorous Jacob, who sits Richard down and lays out the rules of the game for him.

Jacob’s explanation sounds an awful lot like the Book of Job, which depicts God and Satan not as moral absolutes, but as on opposite sides of the argument. Satan thinks that Job’s faith is tied up in his good fortune and that if his fortune takes a turn, he will lose faith. All sorts of bad things happen to Job, but his faith remains strong, proving God’s point.

So the Island is the proving ground where Jacob tries to prove to the Man in Black that people are not inherently corruptible. But more than that, the Island is the prison that keeps the Man in Black’s darkness at bay, and Jacob is the gatekeeper.

Before she came to the Island, Jacob tells Ilana that Richard will know what to do after they have gathered the candidates, but he does not. At the end of the episode, he receives a message from his dead wife (via Hurley) that he must stop the Man in Black to keep the world from going to hell. If this is what Richard had to do next, it doesn’t count as much in the revelation department, since we still don’t know how he’s expected to do that. The one takeaway is that the battle lines have been clearly drawn, so I’m expecting more action going forward.

Miscellany

• So do I finally get my Jin/Sun reunion next week? It looks like Sun is the focus of next week’s episode, so we should at least find out whether flash-sideways Sun can speak English and what happened to Jin.
• The slow trickle of blood through the grate onto the ship captain after the smoke monster’s attack was another haunting image in a season that’s accumulating its share of them.
• I was hoping for a little more time with the neglected characters in the beach gang (Sun, Frank, Miles), but it looks like we’ll be staying with that group next week, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
• I liked Jack’s reaction to the news that Locke was still a player on the Island – it was like he’d forgotten that Locke was dead and was annoyed with having to butt heads with destiny boy again.
• So Charles Widmore’s definitely a jerk, but he seems to be anti-the-smoke-monster-running-loose-around-the-world, so he can’t be all bad, right?
• It seems like the conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black has been going on for pretty much ever – and Jacob’s only had an immortal deputy for 140 years?
• The show’s writers have been pretty adamant that the characters are not dead and the Island is not the afterlife, so I didn’t take Richard’s proclamations at the beginning of the episode very seriously.

-Sawyer

The quote above is about all the previews for last night’s episode gave us to go on – that and a couple shots of Kate and Sawyer making eyes at each other. Sawyer gave up on the Island and the candidate game when Juliet died, so I have no problem following that arc. Unfortunately, it seems like the writers are going to make sure that Kate is wedged into the experience.

In the beginning, Kate was mysterious and adventurous – since about Season 3, she’s become an awful, fickle, manipulative presence. Every time Jack or Sawyer fall for her crap, I lose respect for the character. I mean, other than the fact that Evangeline Lilly is a very attractive woman, what is it about Kate that drives the boys wild?

This week’s episode description was the simplest of the season – Locke assigns Sawyer a mission. Could it be… a reconnaissance mission? This combined with the previews led me to expect lots of Kate and Sawyer tramping around the Island. At least a Sawyer-centric episode seems like the best time to bring Juliet back in a flash-sideways, right?

2004

We start with Sawyer pulling the old pigeon drop again when we find out… he’s a cop! Going after con artists! And Miles is his partner! Last week we had a couple of straight up “What if?” conversations – about how life would have been different for 2004 Ben had he stayed on the Island, or how Frank wound up on the Island even after oversleeping and missing flight 815. In this episode, Sawyer recounts a time where he was going to become either a cop or a criminal – in this reality, he chose cop. In the regular timeline, he alludes to needing money and falling back on con artistry, so this is serious two roads diverged in a yellow wood territory.

The Sawyer in this flash-sideways isn’t much different from the one we know now, but is a contrast to Season 1 Sawyer. He evolved into a more noble character faster in the alternate timeline, but he still carries his dark desire for revenge.

We’ve come to understand that during their time together in the Dharma Initiative, Sawyer and Miles became close, but we haven’t had much of a chance to see it on the Island. It was nice to give that relationship a little more space, even if it was in an alternate reality.

A familiar face crops up as a romantic interest, but not the hoped-for Juliet. I knew that Charlotte (whose back story was a victim of the writer’s strike) would be coming back, but this seems like an odd place to put her. I believe that Miles said that she works with his dad, and if that’s still Dr. Pierre Chang and if he’s still doing the same kind of work, that might lead somewhere, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to put her in the episode. Well, unless Elizabeth Mitchell was just too busy.

The 2004 sequence ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with an Ugh. Because look – there’s Kate again! Does he recognize her from the airport? Are we going to get an explanation for why Sawyer-the-police-officer would help her elude the TSA back in the season premiere? Or had the writers not decided Sawyer was a cop yet at that point? Either way, expect the answers to be annoying.

2007

Well, the expected Kate and Sawyer jungle adventure never materialized, as faux-Locke sent Sawyer to scope out Hydra Island. The rest of the passengers of Ajira 316 are dead, presumably by the smoke monster’s intangible hands. There’s still life in the old station as Charles Witmore’s submarine crew is setting up camp – including sonic pylons to keep smokey at bay. I was surprised to see Charles again so soon – after the sub appeared at the end of last week’s episode, I figured it would take another couple of weeks for it to resurface again (no pun intended).

Faux-Locke’s story is that his group will use the Ajira plane to get off the Island, which is just painful to think about. I mean, the plane is basically intact and able to take off again because it’s on a runway, right? And the Others (with Kate and Sawyer’s help) were building the runway (as ordered by Ben) way back at the beginning of Season 3. So who told Ben to build the runway? And how did that person know… oh, nevermind – you see where I’m going here.

Sawyer makes a deal with Witmore to get him and his friends off the Island, but reveals his plan to faux-Locke when he returns. In keeping with his antipathy towards the cosmic conflict about to take place on the Island, Sawyer explains to (ugh) Kate that he plans to use the conflict between Witmore and faux-Locke to snag the submarine and get off the Island. It seems like he intends to take at least Kate, Jin, and Sun with him, so Sawyer isn’t simply looking out for himself these days, but it also looks like he’ll be even more resistant than Jack to playing out any role Jacob might have for him.

Beyond that, there was some Kate and Claire business left over from last week that dragged down the episode. Claire’s crazy, Kate’s guilt-ridden, they both cry and eventually hug. Faux-Locke provides some dime-store psychology to explain Claire’s behavior, and everything is okay in the end. I guess I just wasn’t the target audience for the sub-plot.

We now have 3 distinct camps of people on the Island, so more wrinkles are being added even as the countdown is on. Sawyer’s playing for the same stakes he always has – to get off the Island – which is refreshing because we don’t know what anyone else is playing at.

Miscellany

• The writers insist that the show’s conclusion will be anchored more in the characters than the grand conflict that surrounds them. Maybe I’ll have to wait that long to see Jin and Sun together again.
• A friend of mine floated an interesting theory today – that the flash-sideways reality is where we’ll see what happens when the smoke monster/faux-Locke/the Man in Black/the Nemesis gets off the Island. We disagreed on some of the details, but what if – in the alternate timeline – the Hydrogen Bomb was the loophole that killed Jacob?
• Since last night was a Sawyer episode, Season 6 is back in sync with Season 1. Since the Sayid episode came when we should have expected a Sun episode, perhaps next week will be a Sun episode (where Season 1 had a Sayid episode). Last week’s Ben episode was in place of a Season 1 Charlie episode. There are nine more characters accounted for in the opening credits that haven’t had their own episode this season (Claire, Desmond, Frank, Hurley, Ilana, Jin, Miles, Richard, and Sun), and eight more episodes until the final. If they consolidate Jin and Sun, and there’s no double-dipping, everyone would get their own feature episode between now and the end of the show. Not only would this spare us from another Jack or Kate episode, but it would also give us the FRANK LAPIDUS EPISODE WE’VE ALWAYS WANTED!
• There have been lots of jokes about LOST spin-offs, but Miles and Sawyer as partners in the LAPD? I’d watch that.
• And for no apparent reason(?) Charlie’s brother! Looking more rock star than suburban dad, it should be noted.
• So… is it just me or is Naveen Andrews overdoing the Sayid-as-zombie bit.
• Definitive proof that faux-Locke is evil: he stopped Claire from killing Kate.
• So faux-Locke had a crazy mom once? I’m sure there’s all sorts of classical mythology I should be scrambling for right now.
• So who or what is in the padlocked door on the submarine? Go crazy with the theories, Internet!
• Sawyer still watches Little House on the Prairie, even though the TV in his apartment presumably gets more channels than the one his childhood trailer did.
• Next week we get a Richard episode!!! It will be either the most satisfying episode of the series or the most frustrating.

So, in the preview for this week’s episode, they pretty much say that Ben dies, right? I was pretty preoccupied with that going into tonight’s episode, but there was plenty else to look forward to. For one thing, on the Island, Ben has been running with Sun, Lapidus, Ilana, and now Miles – the most under-represented characters on the show this season. Also, as skeptical as I am about the relevance of the flash-sideways sequences, I was intrigued by the possibility of finding out about alternate Ben’s life and what role (if any) the Island plays in it.

ABC’s description of last night’s episode reads: Ben deals with the consequences of an uncovered lie. Considering that Ben is commonly referred to among the other Island denizens as King Liar McLiepants of Lyonia, it’s not much of a clue. Still, it’s a Ben-centric episode – perhaps the last one – so it was reasonable to expect some revelations. Whatever happened to Annie? Why the obsession with kids? What are the rules that govern his conflict with Widmore?

2004

I’ve really been trying to be open-minded about the flash-sideway scenes. It worked really well with Sayid last week, and the contrast between the sweet young Claire in What Kate Does and the crazy one in the present is pretty jarring. As I mentioned before, a flash-sideways featuring Ben has the potential to open whole new doors for the show.

This week used the flash-sideways to excellent effect. As with Sayid last week, the flash-sideways juxtaposed the decisions of the alternate Ben with the Ben from the normal timeline. In the alternate 2004, Ben is an over-qualified High School History teacher with designs on becoming the school principal. His prize pupil is Alexandra Rousseau – his adopted daughter in the normal timeline.

The opening flash-sideways dialog is filled with parallels between the two realities. The central themes are an island, the emptiness of a title without the power to back it, and the notion that whoever cares about an institution the most should rule it.

Ben’s machinations in pursuit of the principal’s chair mirror what we can piece together about his coup of Charles Widmore in taking over the island. Both involve Ben going up against an older, more powerful man and using his dalliance with a woman – the school nurse in the principal’s case, Penelope’s mother in Widmore’s as leverage.

Unlike Sayid, who made parallel choices in each reality, the alternate Ben sacrifices his own interests for the sake of Alex. Considering the emotional center of last night’s episode was Ben’s grief at sacrificing his daughter for the sake of the Island, and his acknowledgment of that grief proving to be his salvation, we may have seen a turning point for Ben.

2007

Although Ben was the focal point of the episode, he really didn’t have much to do in the 2007 sequences with the flash-sideways doing most of the heavy lifting. It didn’t take long for the big lie – that he was the one who killed Jacob – to surface, and not much longer for Ilana to decide to kill him. The longer he dug his own grave, the more I figured that the line from the preview – that he would “face his own demise” – would be a matter of Ben being confronted with the possibility of his death, not its actuality.

The combination of Michael Emerson’s performance and the presence of Alex in the flash-sideways really sold his redemptive conversation with Ilana in the episode’s climax. Ben has always been such a slippery character that any redemption or change of heart is going to be a tough sell. We don’t know enough about Ilana yet to know if her decision to spare him is out of character, but dramatically it’s more satisfying to have Ben stay with the small group loyal to Jacob than to join faux-Locke.

Even though this was a Ben episode, the writers managed to smuggle in what may be THE KEY moment to Jack moving forward. Talking to Richard with a lit stick of dynamite inches away, Jack revealed himself to be a man of faith and purpose. Even though he doesn’t know exactly what he’s supposed to do, he seems poised to become the capable leader he showed he could be early in the show’s run.

The show ended lyrically, reprising the way nearly every episode used to end – slow piano music on the beach as the camera lingers on the cast as they make camp and contemplate their circumstances before turning to the slow motion return of Jack and Hurley with Richard in tow. It was a pleasant reminder of a time when the show was involved in smaller, quieter adventures, and an improvised golf course or a ban on nicknames could carry an episode. And then…

WTF – THERE’S CHARLES WIDMORE IN A SUBMARINE OFF THE COAST OF THE ISLAND!

Miscellany

• Going back to Dogen’s intentions when sending Sayid out to face faux-Locke in the jungle in last week’s episode – since it’s “against the rules” for Locke to kill a candidate, was Sayid ever in any real danger? Did Dogen think the “darkness” in Sayid would make him vulnerable to faux-Locke? Was this just a case of sloppy writing?
• I had this great bullet point written about how the candidates aren’t necessarily in line to succeed Jacob because we only have faux-Locke’s word to go on – then Ilana confirmed that this is the case, so that theory’s shot.
• For a minute I was all riled up about Miles knowing about Nikki, Paulo, and the diamonds and then I was all, “Duh, dude talks to dead people.” Also, he referred to them as “jabronies” which is the same term Sawyer used to describe the characters back in Season 3. And did anybody else realize Ken Leung played the spiky “Kid Omega” in X-Men United? Just realized that last night…
• In the flash-sideways, we see Ben taking care of his aged and much mellower father. The Island and the Dharma Initiative are explicitly mentioned, but how and when father and son left the Island is not.
• Great touch bringing back Arzt and dynamite on The Black Rock in the same episode. I really like the “greatest hits” vibe the show has been taking with old locations this season – Sawyer at the Barracks, Jack and Hurley at the Caves, Ilana’s crew at the beach camp.
• So we know for sure now that Richard came on The Black Rock, but everyone had kinda guessed that already, right? I know there are only nine episodes left until the finale, so I won’t gripe if there’s a two-for-the-price-of-one episode devoted to the back stories of Richard and Ilana.
• I swear that exact shot of Sun at the end – arms raised to tie down a tarp, glancing over her shoulder, face lighting up with delight – has been used at the end of an episode before.
• I’m trying not to get too caught up in the Who’s good?/Who’s evil debate. A conflict between two distinct sides is clearly developing, but I’m not convinced it’s going to be as simple as the Autobots versus the Decepticons.
• I’m still getting used to reconciling what we know about the Smoke Monster now with everything that happened before. Why’d he kill the pilot in the first episode, anyhow?
• My original draft of this review got hosed and I had to rewrite it without any of my notes – let me know what I missed in the comments section, but try to be gentle

SAYID: Not for me.

Here’s how abc.com explained last night’s episode: Sayid faces a difficult decision; Claire sends a warning to the temple inhabitants. I gotta say, this one through me for a loop. Assuming that Season 6 is still following the character progression from Season 1, this was supposed to be a Sun episode. Also, her name’s practically in the title, so that seemed like a hint.

On the show, Sun and Jin have been apart for three years, and other than the flash-sideways episodes this season (unhappy again), we haven’t seen them together since Season 4. I mean, come on, Eileen – Jin hasn’t even seen his daughter yet. In the early going, I would get impatient with the Kwon-centric episodes; their pre-island life didn’t fit into the interconnected histories that were revealed for everyone else.

Now, I’ve grown to appreciate the Kwon episodes. Their relationship is more emotionally resonant than the Kate-Jack-Sawyer triangle or the tentative Claire-Charlie romance (remember that?) and has provided a nice anchor for the show. Also, Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim are  terrific actors, so it’s a treat when they get a showcase…

So with my expectations up, I was initially disappointed when it turned out to be a Sayid episode. Don’t misunderstand – I’m a fan of everybody’s favorite Iraqi torturer and breaker of hearts – I’d just built myself up for something else.

My disappointment didn’t last long; Sundown is probably the strongest episode of the season so far. Sayid’s always been a walking contradiction – behind the soulful eyes is a man who is capable of astonishingly brutal acts of violence. Last night’s episode tackled the central question at the core of the character – Is he a good man who has done terrible things, or is brutality simply in his nature?

2004

This week’s flash-sideways had Sayid in Los Angeles visiting his brother Omar and his family. The good news here is that Nadia’s alive. The bad news is that she’s married to Omar.

Even in an alternate reality, Sayid is still tormented by guilt as a result of his past as a torturer in the Iraqi Republican Guard. It is that guilt that led him to push Nadia away and toward his brother.

Meanwhile, Omar has gotten in deep with loan sharks, and asks for Sayid’s help in dealing with them. Sayid refuses, citing his desire to put his violent past behind him. It is until his brother is beaten up and Sayid is abducted that a reckoning comes.

The loan shark turns out to be Kemey, formerly the leader of the Freighter Commandos in Season 4. After some attempts at intimidation by Kemey, Sayid turns the tables on him, killing Kemey’s henchman. Kemey tries to squirm out of it, but Sayid kills him anyway.

A darkness is growing in him, indeed.

2007

This is the first week that the flash-sideways sequences have really paid off in the events on the Island. At the temple, Sayid confronts Dogen about the test he’d undergone a couple of episodes back. According to Dogen, the torture device was a scale for measuring good and evil, and Sayid came up evil. Then they beat the crap out of each other for awhile.

The rest of the time on the Island finds Sayid being alternately manipulated by Dogen and faux- Locke. Destiny versus free will is one of the big themes on LOST, and they pretty squarely let it play out with Sayid last night.

After Dogen tells Sayid that he is evil and would be better off dead, Sayid agrees to go out into the jungle to kill faux-Locke as a way of proving his nobility. When he fails, faux-Locke convinces Sayid that Dogen was setting him up to die, and then quickly sets about recruiting him.

Dogen does a lot of talking in this episode – about his own past as a banker, and about faux-Locke. Dogen characterizes faux-Locke as “Evil Incarnate”, which seems a little on the nose for a show that traffics in ambiguity the way LOST does. Faux-Locke may be Jacob’s polar opposite, but pure good versus pure evil – I just don’t see it.

Faux-Locke makes some kind of deal with Sayid and then sends him back to the temple. Sayid tells everyone gathered there that they can go with faux-Locke and leave the island – that they’re free now that Jacob is gone. Faux-Locke’s need and desire for followers is a little unclear at this point, especially once he goes all smoky and massacres most of the Temple inhabitants. At the end of the episode, Jack, Hurley, Ben, Ilana, Frank, Sun, and Richard seem to be the only ones on the Island left to stand in his way, unless the other Ajira 316 passengers come back into play.

While this episode doesn’t definitively answer whether Sayid is an evil man by nature, he certainly embraces his dark side by the end of the episode, killing Dogen and Lennon before he joins faux-Locke and the surviving Others outside the temple. The episode ended with one of the series’ most haunting images, as Sayid strides through a courtyard filled with flames and corpses, a creepy recording of Claire’s favorite lullaby playing on the soundtrack.

Miscellany

• Looking around the Internet, I seem to be alone in thinking that Christian Shephard is distinct from faux-Locke. I hope this is a case where I’m right and everyone else is wrong, because it’s more interesting if I’m right.
• Another thought from last week – Alternate Jack’s Alternate son is named David. Dave was the name of Hurley’s imaginary friend and Libby’s dead husband. Relevant, or are they just running out of names?
• Why didn’t the smoke monster make friends with Rousseau back in the day? Is it worth trying to retcon something about that now? Also, any chance we’ll see Rousseau and Alex off-island?
• After faux-Locke implies that he can bring back Nadia if Sayid delivers his message, there’s an immediate flash-sideways. Is that what alternate 2004 is – a parallel pocket universe created by faux-Locke for his followers?
• Interesting to see Jin in Kemey’s meat locker. I thought the whole Paik-family-organized-crime thread was going to be left dangling, but it looks like they’ll try and address it here.
• “I’m not the one that needs to be rescued, Kate.” Kate has sort of stumbled into faux-Locke’s crew – now’s the time for Claire to follow through on her promise to kill Kate, right?
• I enjoy bedroom farce on the stage – you know, characters coming and going and just missing each other, but how much longer do we have to wait for the Jin-Sun reunion?
• I’m glad Miles was able to escape with Ilana’s team. I was worried that they were going to kill him off after giving him nothing to do all season.
• Did they really just tell us that Ben is going to die next week in the teaser? ‘Cuz I mean, um, hello? Suspense?

Each week, I try to get a head start on these reviews by prognosticating a bit about the night’s episode. I’d read that the LOST creators are trying to mimic Season 1 as much as possible, so I started there for clues. In Season 1, the two-part pilot episode was followed by a Kate episode, then a Locke episode, then a Jack episode. This season began with a two-part premiere, followed by a Kate episode and a Locke episode, so I had my eyes open for a Jack episode.

It helped that when I looked at the episode trailer on abc.com that Jack was yelling things like, “What does he want from me?!” and the good folks at the network provided this description: Hurley tries to persuade Jack to go with him on an unspecified mission; Jin has an encounter with an old friend.

Well now, if Hurley’s got an unspecified mission, it sounds like he’s on assignment from Jacob again. Last we saw Jin, he was meeting up with Claire (who is seen screaming about the whereabouts of her son in the trailer), so there wasn’t much mystery there. As for the title, my guess was yet another Dharma station, because there’s always another Dharma station.

When I make my notes for each episode, I divide the pages of a steno pad down the middle into 2004 and 2007 sections, so for the sake of clarity, I’m going to try to divide the meat of my reviews into those segments going forward.

2004

So wait, Jack has daddy issues? And now those daddy issues are affecting his relationship with his own son? Ladies and gentlemen, the wit and wisdom of the Clichéatron 3000, a remarkable device that will spit out the same plot you’ve seen a hundred times somewhere else.

In Bizarro 2004, Jack is still divorced, but in this reality, he has a pre-teen son. It isn’t clear whether Sara is David’s mother, but like the differences in Locke’s alternate reality, does any of it signify?

Last week’s flash-sideways was enjoyable despite it’s questionable relevance because it gave us something new to look at. While Jack’s son was a revelation, all we got out of the story was Jack not getting along with David, David running off, then father and son sharing a heartwarming reconciliation complete with uplifting music and gag.

If there’s anything of thematic significance (besides the scar, which I’ll get to below), it’s the notion of Jack “having what it takes.” It seems like an awfully long way around to repeat a theme that most viewers should be familiar with. The flash-sideways material is supposed to pay off in the show’s big picture, but it’s already wearing thin and we’re only a few episodes into the season.

2007

Now for the juicy bits. Back on the island, Jacob appears to Hurley and, as the summary promised, tells him to take Jack on an unspecified mission. They tramp through the jungle, passing Kate (still looking for Claire) and the old caves (memories!) before reaching the titular lighthouse.

The ostensible purpose of the trip is to activate the lighthouse so that the “someone” who is coming to the island can find it. The identity of this someone is – of course – left shrouded in mystery. There are any number of off-island characters that it could be, but rather than speculate which one it could be, I’m going to guess that the someone is Mickey Mouse. I’m probably wrong, but if I’m right, you totally heard it here first.

Like the cave from last episode, the lighthouse contains a dial with the names of the potential candidates and their corresponding numbers. When the dial is turned to Jack’s name and number, the lighthouse’s magic mirror shows Jack his childhood home. This tells Jack that Jacob has been watching him for a long time, and rocks his world so much that he smashes the hell out of the lighthouse.

Earlier in the episode, Jack tells Hurley that he came back to the island because he was broken and thought the island could fix him. As he’s left contemplating the ocean (shades of Rose, Season 1), he may finally be coming to terms with the fact that he came to the island for a reason, and that he has a job to do.

Jacob is pretty blasé about the lighthouse being destroyed, content that Mickey Mouse will arrive on the island by other means. The important thing is that they’re far away from the Temple, because apparently bad stuff is about to happen there.

Meanwhile, Claire is crazy. I don’t know if she’s as unhinged as Rousseau was quite yet, but give her another 13 years. She’s been living in the wild on her own for three years now, and the implication is that she didn’t jump through time with the rest of them.

Like Rousseau, she is obsessed with recovering her lost child from the Others. The difference in her case is that Others don’t actually have her child, Kate does (or did). Kate would probably be a lot less eager to find Claire if she had overheard her casually inform Jin that she would kill her if it was true that Kate was raising Aaron.

Claire has gone through the same “testing” as Sayid did last week, though an interjection from a captured Other suggests that not everything happened the way she remembered it. What’s more, she has allies in her father and her “friend”, who is revealed to be faux-Locke at the end of the episode.

There’s been some discussion about when the big LOST questions will be answered – What is the Island? Why these people? – and the consensus seems to be that all will be revealed in the series finale. For the first four seasons, we knew what the stakes were – it was about getting off the island, and later getting back to it. Since last season (and into this one) the waters have already been muddied, and the stakes that the characters are playing for are no longer clear.

This was another episode that maneuvered characters into position for the final showdown that LOST is building to. Cramming the climactic conflict and all the major revelations into the final pair of episodes  seems like overkill, so  I’m hoping the revelations will come out sooner than later so that we can deal strictly with the conflict.

Miscellany

• In what will surely be the most talked about moment of the show, Jack calls his mom to ask about his appendix scar.  Now, we all know that he had his appendix taken out on the island, but his mom says it happened when he was 7 or 8… ONLY JACK DOESN’T REMEMBER! The walls of reality are totally bleeding together here, dudes.
• So what’s up with Jack’s truck? He drives the same one in both realities, and it looks like a P.O.S. to me – or maybe it’s just ugly?
• Jack tells his son that he can watch the Red Sox game. I reckon that’s a callback to the old Season 1 line, “that’s why the Sox will never win the series”, but as a Sox fan, I also appreciate that the show is currently flipping back and forth between 2004 and 2007 – the last two times the Sox won the series.
• Jack’s son David is a musician. The biblical King David was a musician. DUDES THIS TOTALLY MEANS SOMETHING!
• I don’t remember the exact quote, but I loved Hurley’s “old school” line as he and Jack tramped through the jungle.
• Dogan and son show up off the island. I hadn’t figured him in my list of potential off-island Others last week. What I’m really waiting for is the return of Aldo.
• Claire distinguished between her father and faux-Locke/the Man in Black/the smoke monster, so that means that the Christian on the island is really Christian, right?

The title of this week’s episode didn’t give me as much to go on as last week, so I came into tonight’s episode figuring LOST could hit me with just about anything. Since the teasers showed Locke offering to explain to Sawyer why he was on the island, as well as Sawyer flying around on rickety cliff-ladders, I thought it might be a Sawyer episode.

So I was surprised, if a little confounded when we were delivered a Locke episode. Actually, at this point it’s more accurate to call this a Terry O’Quinn episode than a Locke episode. We had  alternate timeline Locke, and we had faux-Locke, but the real Locke is just a corpse now. Ben’s surprisingly frank eulogy and Sawyer’s recognition that faux-Locke lacked the true Locke’s tell-tale fear were the only moments that belong to the character we knew through the first five seasons.

So what exactly did we see? Well, we saw substitutes. In 2004, the substitute Locke is still in a wheelchair, still tormented by his douchey boss Randy, and still shut out of the walkabout. On the other hand, he’s still with Helen, Hurley bails him out on the job front, and most of all, he seems at ease with his disability.

By the end of the episode, he’s found a fragile happiness. He seems to enjoy being a substitute teacher (thus making the episode title as literal as possible), and he and Helen have weathered the rocky patch of his unemployment and deception to continue planning their wedding.

While it’s nice to see a happy, well-adjusted Locke, it’s still unclear what the actual, y’know, point of these flash-sideways interludes are. Early in the episode, Helen makes a reference to inviting just her parents and his father to a private ceremony. From this, we can infer that Locke’s father did not steal his kidney, cripple him, or otherwise ruin his life, which means that Locke was crippled another way. Will we find out? Does it matter?

There’s lots of buzz around the web about the 2007 iterations of the characters and the 2004 iterations of the characters being linked, the details of which will be revealed when the timelines merge somewhere around mid-season. Right now, the alternate timeline in 2004 has been a fun excuse to play the “what if” game with the characters, but for it to signify, it has to reconcile with where the characters are in 2007. I dread a future in which we see awkward split-screen interactions between characters and their other selves, or a special effects frenzy in which the two versions of each character literally merge together physically. I’m hoping the LOST crew has better ideas.

While the 2004 substitute Locke was a wistful look at what-might-have-been, the substitute Locke in 2007 is determined to make things happen. Faux-Locke, we learn from Ilana, is “recruiting”. He tries and fails to bring Richard into the fold, but seems to have succeeded with an embittered Sawyer.

The new curve ball this week was the appearance of the mysterious blonde boy haunting faux-Locke as he travels around the island. I’ll take the obvious bait and assume that the boy is a younger version of Jacob, but go ahead Internet – fill me with your theories that it’s an older, time-traveling Aaron!

The crucial information that mystery boy relays is that faux-Locke is still bound by the same “rules” that prevented him from killing Jacob himself. Faux-Locke is defiant in traditional Locke fashion (“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”), but he seems to be bound by the rules whether he likes it or not.

The big reveal comes when faux-Locke leads Sawyer to Revelation Cave (the little-known 9^th Dharma Station) and shows him a list of names and numbers written on the cave ceiling. The names are Jack’s, Hurley’s, Sayid’s, either Jin’s or Sun’s, Locke’s, and Sawyer’s. Each one of them is matched with one of the six numbers that have run through the show’s mythology.

What do the numbers mean? Maybe something to Jacob, but there’s no elaboration there. As for the names, each of them are apparently potential successors to Jacob. One of them is supposed to replace him as the protector of the island. Faux-Locke insists the Island is just an island, and the show concludes with Sawyer agreeing to get off the island with him.

Of course, this information is only worth as much as the character speaking it. It’s hard to feel any satisfaction from these revelations when they seem to be made up of only half-truths. Characters are still being arranged around the island, but for the most part, we’re no further along than we were at the end of the season premiere – faux-Locke wants to get off the island, and the characters we’re supposed to think of as “the good guys” are, for the most part, in his way. The final confrontation is beginning to take shape.

Miscellany

• I think Katey Sagal is underrated, and Helen is probably my favorite flashback character;  I’m glad they found a way to bring her back.
• When Locke falls on his front lawn and squints as his face is hit by the sprinkler spray, he does a fair impression of himself when he and Boone are caught in a storm while pursuing Ethan in Season 1.
• Ben works at the same school as Locke. With Ethan showing up at the hospital in last week’s episode, Sawyer and Juliet should be having coffee any day now. If they keep up with the Others showing up in the alternate timeline, who else is there? I mean, Tom for sure, but other than the fore mentioned in this bullet, the rest of the Others were just roster filler, weren’t they? As for Richard, considering he seemed to have some sort of eternal youth/immortality thing working on the Island for a long time, I don’t know how you explain him in 2004.
• Ilana tells us that faux Locke is trapped in Locke-form. I’ve mentioned this before, but that sounds more like a way to keep Terry O’Quinn as a regular than anything else. Also, if we see Christian again, does that mean that he was never the Man in Black? Mystery!

In the comments section of last week’s episode, a reader asked why I hadn’t brought up the ash that apparently keeps the smoke monster at bay. There was so much going on in that episode that I missed it, but as I said in the comments section, I should’ve at least mentioned it in the Miscellany section at the end of the article.

What I’ll say about the ash (and all the other supernatural goings-on that dominate LOST now) is that I hope there’s a simple explanation. I’ve read a comment from either Carlton Cuse or Damon Lindelof that invokes the explanation of the force in The Phantom Menace. Did anyone hear that explanation and not think it was unbearably cheesy?

The LOST writers are on dangerous ground now that they’re going to have to start spelling out the explanations for all the mysteries on the show. To reiterate my point above, I hope they keep things as simple as possible. Look, I own every episode of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so I’ve swallowed plenty of supernatural hokum. Still, I never enjoy being in those situations where I have to dispense part of a show’s mythology to another person whose face goes from confusion to skepticism to pity as I try to defend the logic behind the show (or movie or comic book or whatever).

But I digress. Since this is the first season that I’m watching LOST as it happens, I immediately seized on the title of last night’s episode and started making guesses. The title, “What Kate Does”, reflects the title of the Season 2 episode, “What Kate Did”, where we learn that she became a fugitive when she killed her stepfather.

Going into last night’s episode, original timeline Kate was in the Temple to bear witness to Sayid’s miraculous resurrection while alternate time line Kate had just carjacked a taxi cab with Claire in the backseat.

Going in, I expected the usual from what we saw in the first few seasons of LOST – that what Kate does in the original timeline and what she does in the alternate timeline would reflect one another, which is pretty much how it worked out. In 2007, she used Sawyer’s escape from the Temple as an excuse to begin her search for Claire. In 2004, she formed an unlikely alliance with the still-pregnant Claire after carjacking a taxi cab.

I have to admit that at this point, I’m not much of a Kate fan. I liked her well enough at the beginning of the show’s run, but as the revelations about her past came about, the character lost the mystique that had made her intriguing, and she was increasingly depicted as a woman ruthlessly dedicated to her own sense of self-preservation. Even her decision to take Aaron off the Island seemed to be in this spirit, despite her stated intentions to the contrary.

Since Kate episodes tend towards the melodramatic, I was worried this episode would quickly devolve into another installment of “Evangeline Lilly Sad Face Theater”. Fortunately, we were spared a sobbing/mopey-faced Kate until her conversation with Sawyer at the end of the show.

The 2007 section of the episode split focus between the aftermath of Sayid’s resurrection and Kate’s pursuit of Sawyer. Obviously, they weren’t going to explain the circumstances of Sayid’s return from the dead right away, and the obfuscation persisted throughout the episode.

In proud LOST tradition, last week Lennon demanded that Jack come with him to have a conversation that never happened. Dogen’s promise to answer all of Jack’s questions after torturing Sayid also didn’t happen. After Sayid was “tested”, we learned that he didn’t “pass” the test, and that not only had he been “infected”, but also “claimed”, and that a “darkness” would soon consume him, which, y’know, sounds pretty bad. This was the most mythology-rich aspect of the episode, and I’m sure it’s already been picked apart on the web.

Jack’s decision to take the poison pill himself was a welcome twist. The buildup to that moment had Jack rehashing the old destiny versus free will argument with Dogen, which I guess somebody’s gotta do with Locke being dead now. Jack has always represented the free-will argument on the show, and it was nice to see him use his freedom of choice to act rather than sit on his hands and do nothing.

Elsewhere on the island, Kate is tracking down Sawyer, who has fled the Temple to return to his old house in the Barracks. I’m sure Sawyer will come around eventually, but for now he’s taken himself out of the conflict and mystery at the heart of the show to grieve. In this case, I like that the show is dwelling more on character than plot, and letting his grief for Juliet persist before he becomes part of the main action again. Watching Sawyer pry up the floorboards in his old house echoed the times he pulled guns, medical supplies or girlie magazines from his “stash” in the first three seasons, and the revelation that he was looking for the ring he’d planned to give to Juliet was a welcome surprise. Josh Holloway really sold the character’s pain, which surprised me – I didn’t think he had it in him.

Kate’s motivation for coming back to the Island to find Claire is something the show really hasn’t earned. They tried to reinforce her bond with Claire with the 2004 story, and I know that Kate was there for Aaron’s birth on the Island, but how much of a relationship did those two characters really have? I just don’t remember them really displaying a bond, and as I said above, I question her motivations for taking care of Aaron, so her quest for Claire rings false to me. I suppose you could argue that she feels a need for redemption, but other than getting Samwise Gamgee’s brother shot, what does she really feel guilty for?

At this point in the season, pieces are being arranged on the board. Kate, Sawyer, and Jin are clearly special and important to the show’s end game, so they’ve been scattered around the island to raise the stakes. The Others’ agenda is still a mystery, and Sayid and Claire have been in some way compromised. Throughout the night, the ABC promos trumpeted that, “The time for questions is over,” but it seems like a few more are going to be raised before we get the ultimate resolution at the end of the season.

Miscellany

• Being new to watching LOST on a weekly basis, I’d never seen the “enhanced” versions of the previous episode with the explanatory titles at the bottom of the frame.  Some of it was enlightening (such as the explanation of Montand’s book) but a lot of it felt like they were re-hashing plot points viewers should be familiar with.
• Re-watching LA X Part 2, I was struck by Miles’ genuine compassion for Sawyer after they buried Juliet. Both men put up gruff exteriors but have shown more tender depths.
• Tonight’s episode was full of parallels to Season 1. Sayid’s “test” paralleled his captivity by Rousseau; Kate was with Claire as she went into labor in 2004. Ethan’s comments about not wanting to drug/stick Claire with needles was a little on the nose.
• “You’re not a zombie, right?” “No.  I am not a zombie.”
• I was especially pleased to see It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Creator/Star Rob McElhenney reprise his role as Aldo.
• So, presumably Ethan was evacuated as an infant along with Miles in 1977, right? I guess his mother was just more invested into returning to the Island.
• “I shouldn’t have followed you.” “Which time?”
• Nice misdirection with Aldo constantly interrupting Justin about the island traps. Looks like Claire is the new Rousseau, which begs the question, was Rousseau also “infected”?
• Was it just me, or was Kate’s knockout of Aldo and Justin terribly executed on a filmmaking level? Seemed to me like Evangeline Lilly oversold the grunt and the sound effects department didn’t do anything to emphasize the impact of her blows.
• We didn’t see any of the Others and faux Locke at the beach this episode, but there’s still the question of why Richard stopped Ilana from shooting faux Locke at the end of last week’s episode. Just wanted to write that down while I thought of it

Let me know anything I missed or misinterpreted in the comments section!

Whoa (and if you haven’t read my quick and dirty LOST primer, that’s a Keanu Reeves in The Matrix “Whoa”, not a Joey Lawrence on Blossom “Whoa”).

LOST has always been about what you can take at face value and what you can’t. In Tuesday night’s episode when Boone implies he couldn’t bring his sister with him, and Locke talks about going on his walkabout, should we suppose they’re lying because of what happened in Season 1?

Well, we’re not about to find out.

The timeline, it appears, has been split. There’s a timeline on the plane (that kicks off just before the plane was going to crash) and there’s everyone on the island pushed forward in time by the explosion of the Hydrogen Bomb, but still on the island.

So from the credits, it looks like Sayid, Richard, Desmond, Claire, Ben, Frank, Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, Jin, Sun, Miles, Kate, Locke (or whoever wears his face) and Ilana are the main cast this season. As for the guest stars, Bernard, Rose, Charlie, Boone, Frogurt and Dr. Arzt’s appearances pretty much amounted to a game of hey-look-those-characters-we-recognize-are-here! Jacob’s appearance pushed the main characters (and hopefully the story) forward, and Juliet was given an appropriately dramatic death. I was sorry to see Juliet go, but Elizabeth Mitchell’s status as a guest star in last night’s episode, her commitment to V, and the fact that the last time we saw her she was blowing up a Hydrogen Bomb didn’t make me very bullish about her continued presence on the show. I’ll miss her chemistry with Sawyer, and I dread the inevitable return of the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.

The episode was essentially split into three parts – at the Swan/Temple, on the Bizarro Oceanic flight 815, and on the beach by the statue foot, so that’s how I’ll break down the review.

The Swan/The Temple

Jumping forward from 1977 to 2007 hurls Jack, Sawyer, and the rest into crisis control mode, which is a pretty familiar place for them to be. The attempt to save Juliet provided plenty of drama, including her genuinely touching death and the rekindling of the animosity between Jack and Sawyer. The big reveal from Juliet (through Miles) that, “It worked,” is open for debate, but that’s par for the course here.

The second hour of the show found those characters in high adventure mode, following the instructions of the ghostly Jacob to the mysterious Temple where Sayid would be healed. A mini-mystery was resolved (what’s in the guitar case?), new Others were introduced, and the Temple is finally revealed. The Temple seemed pretty standard – lots of exposed stone and rough passageways – which is fine; not everything on LOST needs to be mind-blowingly strange.

The pool that they put Sayid into seems to be ground zero for the healing powers of the island (see also, Locke, paralyzed, Rose, cancer, and Ben, shot).  Naveen Andrews’ presence in the regular cast made me confident he wouldn’t die, but I liked how they drew it out just a bit – especially the scene of Jack trying to resuscitate Sayid while Kate told him it was too late, an almost beat-for-beat reprise of the scene with  Charlie after he was hanged in Season 1. Fortunately, this didn’t play out over the courses of like, 8 episodes, which can be the case on this show.

Bizarro Oceanic 815

Like a lot of the things that happen on LOST, the scenes on Bizarro Oceanic 815 should make more sense once we see the big picture. Last night, it was fun playing the hey-look-what-happened-differently game even if we don’t know what it all signifies.

Basically we know that Jack’s still a doctor (but a nervous flier), Locke’s still in a wheelchair (but a little more chipper), and Kate’s still a fugitive (with an overmatched escort). Having Charlie back was nice, even if it was just fan service, and although she was introduced with a rush at the end, it’s nice to have Claire back, too.

Beach/Statue Foot

So this was where all the juicy mythology came out. We do learn that the smoke monster and the mysterious man in black are one and the same, but it’s not clear what that means. Either way, he’s still walking around looking like John Locke. I don’t know if there’s a practical reason for this disguise other than giving them a way to keep Terry O’Quinn on the show, which is probably reason enough.

After getting Ben to kill Jacob, faux Locke asks to see Richard. After a confrontation with Jacob’s bodyguards, he knocks Richard out and carries him off, so clearly he wants something more than Richard’s death.

There’s been a lot of chatter that this season would feature an epic throw down between good and evil, and they’re not wasting any time on the island. The Others and the castaways are seen fortifying the temple at the end of the episode, and the man in black/smoke monster/faux Locke has stated that his agenda is to “go home”, which seems to mean “leave the island”, which I’m guessing is a bad thing. We’ll find out.

Welcome back to the island.

Miscellany:

• Desmond’s on the plane!  And nobody sees him but Jack.  MYSTERY!
• In the future where the plane doesn’t crash, THE ISLAND IS UNDERWATER!
• Hurley is apparently super lucky in the alternate timeline.
• Sawyer’s all, “I’m gonna kill Jack if Juliet dies,” then Kate’s all, “Don’t,” then Sawyer’s all, “No, letting him suffer is better.” YAWN
• Nice of Miles to relay Juliet’s final, cryptic thoughts.
• Charlie almost chokes to death swallowing his stash and then tells Jack, “I was supposed to die.” Cuz remember like all of Season 3 when his death was foretold?
• “Jim, kiss me.”  “You’re kinda bloody.”
• Even in an alternate reality, Marshal Edward Mars gets beat up by a girl.
• So when they hauled the Ankh out of the guitar case, the first thing everyone thought was Ace of Base, right?

IGN Rewind Theater analysis:

My take:

I’ll start off by saying that the theory of this game taking place “in the future” is ridiculous. Even given their evidence, I don’t know why they’d think that. It’s very clear to me that the Joker is recuperating from the effects of the Titan serum. That WAS Harley Quinn we saw and the Joker isn’t old. A zeppelin in the sky does not show a futuristic Gotham. Gotham City has always been timeless and therefore includes elements of futuristic technology with older artistic styles. If this game were truly to take place in the future, a large portion of the architecture would no doubt be more representative of the Gotham City we’ve seen imagined in more future-based stories like Batman Beyond. Furthermore, no one wants to play as a “60-year old Bruce Wayne.” We want to keep kicking butt in the same manner that we got to in the first game. IGN made some good observations in the Two-Face poster, the Iceberg Lounge, and the reference to Black Mask, but that’s it.