s3e06: I Do

The Attack of the Pointless Backstory continues. Seriously, this gimmick was fun while it lasted, but can we please just admit that it's no longer adding anything to the story? I almost feel like they're only keeping it in just in case the show picks up new viewers and they aren't yet aware that Kate is a fugitive. Nothing else could possibly account for the inclusion of such a lame-ass backstory. I guess it tells us that even when Kate was happy, she couldn't stop running, and now that she isn't running anymore, she can feel free to get it on with Sawyer and not be all scared that her past will catch up with her. But who the hell couldn't have inferred that from oh, I don't know, the entire rest of the series?

Meanwhile, Pickett really wants to kill Sawyer, which continues to annoy me because dude. You totally brough this on yourself. Trace the chain of events back to the beginning: Others kidnap Sawyer (and Jack and Kate); Sayid, Jin, and Sun give chase; Others raid boat; Sun shoots Colleen. Other than that, Sawyer played absolutely no part in it. So you'll forgive me if I'm not quite buying "this is for Colleen." Not that I think the character is supposed to be sympathetic, but jeez. Annoying. It's almost like a token gesture - why doesn't he chase down the person who actually did it? "No, this is easier. And he's one of them so it's basically the same thing." Wuss.

In plot two, Jack uses his doctor skills to hold the Others hostage by inflicting a wound on Ben that will kill him in an hour if Jack doesn't fix it. I wonder just how many of them wanted Ben out of the way, considering the scrambled response to Jack's actions. Then Jack tells Kate to run and that's the episode. Considering we've got three months before the next one, I was expecting a little more of a cliffhanger.

In the barely-touch-on plot three, Eko is buried. Locke sees a line of scripture on Eko's prayer stick that says to look north, and gets that first-season glint back in his eye.

Next time on Lost: well, a whole bunch of stuff, because in three months we get sixteen straight episodes. Question: do you prefer this way, or if they'd gone the way of 24 and just started in January? Two hiatuses is a little annoying.

s3e05: The Cost of Living

Maybe it's just me, but I think this episode title is a veiled reference to the moving-violation arrests that preceded the deaths of Ana Lucia, Libby, and now Mistereko. It's like Abrams, Lindelof and Cuse saying to the actors, "You want your character to keep living? Don't do anything off the set that might land you in trouble. No drinking and getting behind the wheel of a car. That's the cost of living, my friends." I guess it actually refers to the "vaccines-for-protection" arrangement from the Eko flashback (by the way, can we officially get suspicious of any future flashback that doesn't feature Jack, Kate, or Sawyer yet? We're now 3-for-3 on characters getting flashback episodes right before dying, with Libby being the only counterexample, but she was also the least fleshed out of the characters to go), but still.

Back in St. Othersburg, Jack tells Benry Gale he knows about the tumor. Benry stonewalls him, but later not only confesses that he has a tumor, but suggests that the entire thing has been a plot to get Jack to do the surgery, as he reveals that he found out about his tumor two days before the plane crash. Benry was trying to set up a scenario to condition Jack to like him and want to do the surgery. And clearly, locking him in a room is the best way to do that. It's revealed that Juliet was chosen to be Jack's minder specifically because she "bears a striking resemblance to [Jack's] ex-wife." A striking yet superficial resemblance? I suppose I can see it a little bit, but then they really had a limited selection, right? Even if she looked nothing like Sarah, she probably would still have done it just because she was blond and a woman. At the end of the episode, Juliet reveals via super-secret video that she and possibly some others in the group (other Others? Ba-dum-pssh!) would like nothing more than for Jack to "accidentally," wink-wink, kill Benry Gale during the surgery. Coup-d'e-freakin'-tat!

Meanwhile, Eko has visions of his brother and wanders into the jungle. Locke, Sayid, Desmond, and a couple of contract players head for the Pearl, so they all end up in the same place. Eko's brother's body has vanished from the plane, and then Eko is seeing very tangible visions of him. In the backstory, we find out that Eko killed some gangsters while posing as a priest, and that the building of the church he was doing was based on something a woman told him, that because he had defiled his brother's church by committing murder inside, he "owe[d] him a church." Why he thought that project was worth abandoning to push the button is never really explained, and now it won't be because after his brother's vision apparently reveals itself as some sort of shape-shifting demon (I have no idea either), the black smoke shows up big-time, forms into a hand, flings Eko around, and EKO FUCKING DIES.

I thought Naveen Andrews was being a bit whiny last year when Shannon was killed off and he huffed about how he thought characters were being killed for no reason, but it seems like we're going that way. What purpose did killing Eko serve? How are we going to learn more about the questions that were raised in this episode? I can't say it makes a ton of sense to me. And he was one of the best characters in the show! Can't they just kill the completely useless Charlie already? Seriously, please. If he makes it to the end of the run while all these other interesting characters get slapped aside, the finale better include a scene of the black smoke wearing headphones and rocking out to a Driveshaft CD.

Oh, and there's some eyepatch-wearing guy in another hatch, although which one or where it is, we don't know. That's the sort of tantalizing clue that's just interesting enough not to be answered for another year and a half. This was at least a pretty well-done episode overall, but it ended with a couple of the most frustrating aspects of the show.

Next week: the fall season finale already. If they have sixteen more episodes to run after this, and they're going to run them in sixteen straight weeks like I heard, that's cool, but on the other hand it means no more Lost until what, late January? Early February? Bring it back for February sweeps and run it straight through May sweeps? That's a long break, even if it means no interruptions for most of the season - I already waited four months for the third season to start, and now after wetting my beak, I have to wait another almost three months for the rest of it? Oof. Anyway, the teaser promises the best episode of the year so far (I'll believe it when I see it). At the very least it'll probably have the best cliffhanger, no? It also has Sawyer's life apparently in danger yet again, a plot involving Benry's tumor, and Kate flashbacks.

s3e04: Every Man for Himself

Operation Humanize the Others begins, as Juliet drags Jack in to save the woman Sun shot, but he can't, so her husband goes berserk and beats the crap out of Sawyer for having a Sun Number of 1. Kate says she loves Sawyer to get him to stop, but later goes back on it - the Sawyer/Kate dance is getting a little ridiculous at this point, isn't it? Just get them together already. Pretending Jack is part of the love triangle isn't fooling anyone.

Jack seems eager enough to play doctor, perhaps just hoping for a return to a sort of normalcy. Then he displays his awesome doctor powers by diagnosing Benry Gale from a single set of X-rays (next week: special guest star Bill Frist!). Benry Gale has a spinal tumor, and Jack is a spinal surgeon, hmm hmm hmm hmm. The question is why they're jerking him around so much first. Wouldn't you want to placate the guy a little bit before you let him operate on your leader? (For the record, that Benry Gale was X-ray tumor guy was only confirmed in next week's teaser, but Drew correctly guessed it before that anyway.)

The Others con Sawyer into thinking they've put a pacemaker in his heart that will kill him if he gets too worked up. Of course they haven't - look at the hack job they did on Colleen, for crying out loud - but Sawyer isn't as aware of their non-medical skills as Jack ends up being. Benry Gale calls Sawyer out on being hot for Kate - ah-durr - and then reveals that they're not even on the same island anymore, but rather the next one over. Which they got to how, exactly? Whatever. Hot-air balloon.

Meanwhile, in the three-scene Desmond plot, he apparently foresees a rainstorm. So did he gain the ability to see the future, or just Doppler radar? He puts up a golf club as a lightning rod. Why? I'm guessing because he can, since no other reason is evident. I'm sure this will pay off somewhere way, way down the road, perhaps when Penny rides in to save everyone in, you know, Season Nine.

I do have to say that Sawyer episodes tend to be among the very best - both of his first season episodes were stellar, in particular, and last season's "The Long Con" was pretty good although its setup was questionable. This one was kind of more of the same - you think Flashback Sawyer is doing one thing but really he's doing another - except that Sawyer does display a little genuine human emotion in setting up a bank account for his apparent daughter. (By the way, is it at all funny that the woman who got conned called the police when she had originally requested that Sawyer teach her how to con? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) And the scene with Sawyer and Benry looking out at the island was strong.

One other interesting thing: the Others refer to "the sky turning purple," suggesting that they don't know that much about the island themselves - the Dharma people knew about the electromagnetism, after all. But if this is much of a clue, I doubt it will get play again for months.

Next week: Locke and Eko may not be getting along. Some dude with an eyepatch is in one of the hatches observed on Pearl TV. Jack tells Benry he knows about the spinal tumor (this has to be what they're going to be willing to release him for, right? Though knowing Jack, he'll try to haggle them up for more releases). And while it's at best vaguely alluded to, could we finally see a return of the security system? Do you realize we haven't seen it since, unless I'm mistaken, the tenth episode of last season? A little too long, especially considering how much it showed up in the first season.

s3e03: Further Instructions

I guess this episode wasn't bad, but it had a few negative things going for it:

1. Our third crappy backstory in a row. I suppose it's interesting to find out exactly what the characters did before they were here, but is it too much to ask that those things not be totally disposable? Jack's and Sun's both told us nothing about the characters we didn't already know (and did so in pretty on-the-nose fashion, too), and Locke's barely even makes sense, except that it shows - again - that he's long been searching for meaning in life and keeps having a hard time finding it. Is there a more pathetic character in TV history than Backstory Locke? I say no.

2. A return to my least favorite of the abandoned plot strands, Charlie and Claire. In the first season, these small interpersonal conflicts on the beach were all well and good, but with the scope of the series having expanded dramatically, they just seem trivial and a waste of time now. Plus, Charlie and Claire continue to duke it out for the title of Most Annoying Character, particularly with Michael having sailed off (yes, I know his boat did not have a sail).

3. A totally cheesy plot device: the return of Boone in a hallucinogen-induced dream sequence of Locke's. Barely rates above Jamie Kennedy's cameo in Scream 3 on the list of "Most Forced Guest Appearances Ever." Why did Boone need to show Locke every single other person of concern? We already know he's not going to be able to do anything for most of them. Seemed like a lot of foot-dragging, which has defined the better part of the first three shows of this season, dare I say.

The whole hatch thing strikes me as a little implausible (all the metal sucks in on itself, but the survivors are blown outwards?), and it sure looked like they left a continuity goof in there (what kitchen is Hurley going to get bandages from if the hatch went reverse Big Bang on us?), but I guess I can live with that for now. Desmond potentially seeing future events, however, seems like it has potential to either get unlikely in a hurry or just offer tons of openings for future deus ex machinae.

I suppose it seems like I'm complaining a lot, and I suppose I am. I still like the show - there is, overall, none more compelling on television week to week - but I'm starting to get a little more frustrated with its pacing and general tendency to pad out its episodes with a ton of needless filler when it could be giving out actual info.

Next week: Kate, do you like Sawyer? Check yes or no. The Others clearly either like over-the-top psych testing or they're just a bunch of sadists. Or maybe both.

New blog theme song!

Courtesy of an excellent video and audio editor on YouTube...




Uh, awesome.

s3e02: The Glass Ballerina

AKA "Sun is a big fat liar." In part two of the three-part series "Let's find out what happened to everyone after the finale as slowly as possible," Sayid thinks he's luring the Others into a trap, but they sneak around him and take the sailboat, which Sun manages to get off of after killing an Other who was only introduced in this episode. No fish biscuits for you, Sun! We see in flashbacks that there's a lot of stuff she doesn't tell Jin - such as sleeping with Baldy, who might be the father of her baby as I speculated a few months ago - which is paralleled in the present-day plot, where she helps Sayid keep Jin in the dark about his true motives. Except not really, because he's gaining a better understanding of English. So, having accomplished nothing and helped the Others get another boat, the three head back to base camp.

Back at Others HQ, Sawyer makes out with Kate, though it seems like he does it mostly to see how the Others will react and how tough they are. Stone-cold bitch Juliet gets him in line by threatening to shoot Kate. Sawyer explains his whole plan to Kate, not thinking that he might be under surveillance. But guess what?

Finally, Benry Gale goes into Jack's cell and tells him that he can go home if he cooperates with the Others, using footage of the Red Sox's World Series win to prove that the Others have contact with the outside world. (He also answers the question of why they'd still be on the island if they were able to get off when he says that he's lived on the island his whole life. 40 years or so? That predates Dharma, unless he's a lot younger than he looks.) The question is, what will Jack have to do?

One guess: harm/kill one of his people. Bear in mind Jack has known these guys just over two months; could the prospect of getting off the island prove too tempting to resist? (Probably not, if we know Jack, but who ever knows anything with this show?)

I should note that if I had a nickel for every time the show had an episode that treaded water for 58 minutes and then suddenly got interesting in the last two, I'd probably be working on a buck and a half. It's one of the few things that really drives me up a wall about Lost; the tendency of most episodes is to spin the wheels all show and then grab us back with a tantalizing ending. In some respects that's how the seasons have started to go, too - how much did we learn in the entire second season, and then they gave us a whole bunch in the finale? It's a little bit cheap and I wish they could offer more on an individual episode basis.

Next week: Fooled you, Flanders! Made you think Locke, Eko, and Desmond were dead! They're not, though. But you thought they were! But they're not.

s3e01: A Tale of Two Cities

It's hard to believe that it's been four and a half months since the Season 2 finale, doesn't it? It's also hard to believe that after all the punches in that episode, the premiere would be such a letdown, but that was my first impression.

The pre-title sequence was pretty cool - at least, the last minute of it was, while the rest was mostly misdirecting filler. But after that, things kind of go downhill. Far too much of what's becoming a Lost staple, where one character asks a question that the audience wants to know the answer to, and the character of whom the question is being asked says nothing and sometimes just walks away. After a while that stops being mysterious and just gets irritating. The flashback scenes were, as far as I'm concerned, among the most useless in the show's run. (And, again in somewhat typical fashion, a character doesn't just say one sentence that could clear up a misunderstanding. Why didn't Jack's dad just say, "Dude, I didn't sleep with your wife?" Getting flustered and rambling about "letting it go" only makes things worse, guy!)

Still no explanation of what the Others want with Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, of course; some experiments are apparently going to be conducted (maybe?), or at least something that will make Kate's next two weeks unpleasant, but naturally there's pretty much no hint of what that is. Also, the Others somehow have all this information - and apparently it's ridiculously detailed, right down to the emotional state of Jack's ex-wife - yet when do they ever get off the island? And it's in neat little binders and everything so it's not like they have it e-mailed in. Once more, typical Lost - the more things are revealed, the less sense they tend to make. It's a good thing (or maybe a bad thing, depending on how you want to look at it) that I started with last year's premiere and not this year's, because I doubt it would have hooked me at all. But it's too late now.

Next week: Sayid, Jin and Sun attempt a daring sailboat rescue that probably fails. Benry Gale wants the boat (maybe because he gave his to Michael). Probably more happenings in Dharmaville, too, although I don't know that any made the teaser.

s2e23: Live Together, Die Alone

Ohhh, I've wasted my life.

I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that after all the posturing, all the promises, ultimately what we got in the season finale was a whole bunch more questions - and, by my count, one answer. There were more sightings of the ABC7 severe weather bulletin than loose ends tied up. (Incidentally, that bulletin makes me want to put my foot through the TV screen. Hey, WLS - if I were curious as to what the weather were doing, I would flip over to the Weather Channel. I'm trying to watch the fucking finale of Lost, and now I can't see Charlie's head because you need to show me a thunderstorm watch six counties away.)

I guess that we learned more than we did last season. Last season the Others shot Sawyer and took Walt and blew up the boat, leaving Michael and Sawyer stranded and Jin missing. And Jack and Locke blew up the hatch door, revealing... a tunnel descending into the ground. And that was all we really got.

By those standards, finding out that the electromagnetism brought the plane down at least qualifies as an answer - though again, it was pretty much the only one. (Yes, there's "also, it's not just an experiment," but those are kind of the same answer if you think about it.)

Otherwise, we get plot points that leave questions: Jack, Kate, and Sawyer being taken away (why on earth those three?), Michael sailing away (would it be wrong of me to hope that's the last time we see him on this show?), Locke and Eko MIA (if we're assuming Desmond died, could they possibly have escaped unaffected?), Charlie and Claire all lovey-dovey ("I love you, guy who kidnapped my baby, like, a week ago!" - seriously, who gives a crap at this point), and Desmond's girlfriend apparently using her immense wealth to pay two guys in the Antarctic to monitor electromagnetic anomalies, because for some reason she knows that those are connected with Desmond. (Or maybe she doesn't and she's watching them for some other reason, so there can be some emotional reunion late in Season Three. But I bet it's the first one.)

More things left hanging:

* Sayid, Jin and Sun?
* That statue? Four toes??
* Are we ever going to see the "security system" again, and are we ever going to find out what the hell it is?
* Are the Others Dharma or aren't they?
* Why are everyone's lives so interconnected?
* Is the rest of the blast door map ever going to be used?
* If Inman is a big tough army guy, how come he went down like such a sack of dirt?

A whole season and we learned so little. Lost can probably parcel itself out for seven or eight years at the current rate. Also, J.J. Abrams? Never tell me what is the coolest ending ever again. You've lost your L.A. privileges. And yet I'm totally going to wait four months (also, buy the DVDs the day they release) and then let myself get pulled along again. And if you're still reading this... I'm guessing so will you.

s2e22: Three Minutes

Were the episodes before the two-hour finale this space-filling last season? We got virtually nothing new out of "Three Minutes," if you ask me - we learned for sure what Michael's up to, but it only tells us about 10% we didn't already know. The Eko plot was largely undeveloped. The only thing we really learned about the Others was that, oddly enough, Michael's description of them was largely accurate in terms of what he actually knew. "Three Minutes" is apparently the amount of worthwhile time Michael spent with the Others. Two whole weeks and he was just tied up the whole time? Awesome.

There were a couple nice character moments - Charlie pitching the statues and Locke seeing him do it, and Sawyer telling Jack he's the closest thing Sawyer has to a friend - which, interestingly, were pretty much back-to-back. Also, Sayid is really gunning to take over the #1 spot on the Most Bad-Ass Person on the Island list; Eko's slipping fast and Locke's diminishing faith is turning him back into kind of a wimpy jerk. Oh yeah, and then an obviously not seaworthy boat rolls up.

Next week: a two-hour season finale! Desmond reappears, as does the security system (I'm guessing from the clips). At least some people get onto the boat (was anyone manning it?). The pneumatic tube doesn't go anywhere except to a big pile in the middle of the jungle, so The Pearl is obviously just another hoaxy experiment. The blast doors close again; Locke tries to smash the computer. And according to the voiceover, a number of questions will be answered, including what really happened to the plane. Drew declared that it looked too good to be true, but I'm hopeful. Here's to a few nice answers and a sweet cliffhanger.

s2e21: ?

My sentiments exactly. For a late-season episode, this one was surprisingly underwhelming, especially since it spent most of its time doing dramatic reveals on things any smart person should already have been aware of.

I'll ask: is there a person in the world who didn't think the button was an experiment from the very first second? Maybe there is actually more to it and maybe there isn't, but The Pearl was largely a waste; if all we learned was that the button for sure didn't do anything, that hardly seems worth all the question mark trouble.

And if you thought Libby was going to make it... no. She did survive, but not even for as long as the marshal did in Season One, and she got even less information out - the single word "Michael," which naturally was assumed by Jack and Hurley to be an inquiry into Michael's condition and not an accusation.

So that was basically the entire episode. Didn't learn much, did we? I imagine this sets the table to some degree for the next two (incidentally - only 23? Or is the finale two hours?), but still. For a mid-May, late-season episode, this felt dangerously close to filler.

Next week: Sayid is smarter than everyone else, and we appear to get another on-island flashback episode in which we see what Michael was up to for... what was it, a week and a half of island time?

Brief speculation

Jack's dad = not dead?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this theory, but I did arrive at it independently this evening. Consider:

*Jack's dad was directly responsible for Jack and Ana Lucia being in Australia.
*Jack's dad crossed paths with Sawyer in Australia.
*Jack's dad might also be Claire's dad.

That's a lot of connections to various castaways, no? Also consider the fact that we never actually see Jack's dad's body (empty casket, anyone?). Also consider that Jack's dad has shown up on the island - it would seem the island can cause hallucinations, but it's also been hinted that certain things or people may just appear. The horse in "What Kate Did" was certainly flesh and blood as far as could be told.

Also, we know there's a big twist coming at the end of the season. How big would it be if Jack stumbles down some dank corridor buried in the jungle, opens a door, and sees his father standing there in a suit? I can even picture how they'd probably shoot that.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, because I like to be surprised. But if you could bet this stuff in Vegas, and they had "Jack's Dad is 'Him'" at like 20:1 odds, I might lay down a sawbuck.

s2e20: Two for the Road

Bizarre episode. With the exception of "Henry" telling Locke that he came to get him, 95% of it seemed to be distracting filler designed to keep you blissfully unaware of the ending. Do I have to be suspicious of any backstory that doesn't feature Jack or Locke from now on? Because whenever they kill a character, they always make that character the flashback. Because I like my flashbacks to be wholly, 100% pointless.

Of course, Ana Lucia has always been kind of a dead-end character - her presence on the island didn't really give us much. Even when they threw Jack's dad into the mix, it didn't do a whole lot to make her backstory anything other than self-contained - the same of which was pretty true for Shannon and Boone. Characters like that only exist to affect other characters - Boone affected Locke, Shannon affected Sayid. Ana Lucia - I don't even know. Sawyer, now that they got down? Jack, because that's what Jack does? Nobody, because we all hated her?

The Libby thing is even weirder. Is the goal to turn Hurley into a ball of rage? Would that even work? And why bother establishing the beginnings of a backstory for Libby if you're just going to kill her off? It's like they filmed the rest of the episode and then Rodriguez and Watros drove drunk and the producers were like "Quick, just kill 'em both." Except this episode was probably filmed after that happened.

Anyway, I was at least partially right about Michael - he has to be a tool of the Others somehow. He kills "non-good-person" Ana Lucia, then shoots himself superficially, making it look like Henry shot him and escaped - and this also allows him to stay among the castaways in their confidence, the most effective mole yet. As Drew pointed out, his story about two dozen Others living in tents doesn't really jive with the whole "they aren't really jungle people" thing, which we've already seen. So he's clearly just telling the kind of story that will lead everyone else right to the slaughter - or rather, the metaphorical slaughter, since I guess the Others want some of the people for certain reasons.

As silly as some of this stuff is getting - the Ana Lucia/Jack's dad backstory was pretty ridiculous and appears to have been ultimately pointless in the extreme - the show as a whole probably has me about as hooked as it ever has, because I just have to see where this is all going. Eko presumably does not die next week, so what saves him in that fall? Isn't next week the one where we're scheduled to learn about the door, or is that two weeks? Either way.

s2e19: S.O.S.

Damon Lindelof recently gave an interview where he described the season's first 19 episodes as the "calm before the storm" of the last five, which might help explain why tonight's episode was pretty blasé. The A-plot and flashbacks recognize the fact that Bernard and Rose are the only major characters not seen in flashback until this point (Libby has never had her own episode, but it's arguable how major she is as a character and she was in a Hurley flashback anyway), by showing that they actually haven't known each other very long. Which I guess explains why they don't get along or seem to have a tremendous amount in common. Whatever. Then we find out that Rose used to have terminal cancer and the island healed her, and she has a little moment with Locke where they basically exchange knowing nods, because Rose remembers seeing Locke in his wheelchair in the airport. Oh, and Bernard is really annoying for the whole episode, bossing everyone around for his S.O.S. sign which Rose hates. When Bernard realizes that Rose wants to stay, he states it very specifically for the two people who couldn't tell from the rest of the episode. "You don't want to leave? Because you think the island fixed you?" Thanks, Bernie.

Also, Alma noted that Bernard's bottom row of teeth are pretty terrible and snaggled. And this guy is a dentist? But let's be fair: maybe he's a dentist in a town with no orthodontists.

In the B-plot, Jack goes to see if the Others will trade Walt back for "Henry," even though "Henry" says they won't. The Others don't show up, but after some Jack and Kate semi-flirtation, Michael does, in a fairly predictable ending.

In the C-plot, Locke can't draw the diagram from the blast door, but then he does.

Next month, probably, on Lost: Michael says the castaways could totally take the Others. "Henry" suggests that that might not be the case when he apparently kicks Ana Lucia's ass despite being tied up; the question is, if he could escape like that at any time, why didn't he before? And some gun-having shenanigans are going down. Fun fact: in island time, Michael's only been gone, like, two weeks. Oh, and you can bet there'll be more with Locke's diagram, though possibly not in the very next episode.

Anyone else wonder if Michael isn't exactly what he seems? He's been gone for a while. Okay, I guess it's exactly like the old Michael to charge into the Others' lair, guns blazing. But maybe he's being used as a lure somehow, even if unknowingly. Someone is supposed to die in the final five episodes - would they finally go with a true "major" character (Jack, Locke, Sawyer, Kate) or would it be someone on a bit more of the fringe (Charlie, Ana Lucia, whoever)? I'm guessing the latter. Guesses as to the inevitable season-ending cliffhanger? I say it probably involves discovering something big about the Others, like some sort of headquarters, or an airplane tarmac, or something. (Speaking of which, shouldn't Jack have been a little more fazed by the revelation that the Others are playing dress-up? Maybe he just didn't believe Kate.)

s2e18: Dave

In the B plot, we learn for sure that the counter doesn't really do anything when it hits zero. Sure, we get all that blue light, but that's it. Of course, "Henry" could be lying about that (and Locke says he doesn't believe him), but would anyone really be surprised? I always thought it was more or less implied that the button didn't really do anything and Dharma just wanted to see how long people would push it if they were told it did something but not what. It also would seem that the Others are not connected, at least not directly, to Dharma, which is much more interesting. "Henry" also insinuates that some unknown power keeps the island hidden from outside eyes, perhaps suggesting that, indeed, the only people who end up on the island have a purpose there. But what that is... who can say. Of course, since it would potentially offer all kinds of answers to devote a whole show to an interrogation of "Henry," the B plot only gets about ten minutes of screen time.

In the A plot, Hurley goes all Tyler Durden on us. The fact that "Dave" wasn't real was so telegraphed, I called it before we even saw Dave in the hospital; just the way Hurley and his doctor talked about him made it pretty clear where things were going. Still, it was somewhat interesting to watch Hurley struggle with his inner demons, even if at this point in the season I'd have preferred some more plot. I almost feel like this episode existed more to rule out a potential conclusion - the "it's all in someone head à la St. Elsewhere" finale - than anything else. Dave's explanation of the numbers wasn't unconvincing, but you knew they weren't going to go that way in the end - certainly not this early - so it more comes down to Hurley trying to convince himself that the numbers aren't a freaky island mystery. But I guess they still are.

Speaking of freaky mysteries, so that's where Hurley knows Libby from. Of course, this doesn't mean she was never a clinical psychologist, and if Hurley could be released then so could she. She could end up being a crazy Hurley stalker, but that doesn't make much sense, and she certainly doesn't seem unhinged at this point. I guess we'll see. Or maybe we won't! This has all the makings of a "plot point that doesn't get resolved until next season."

And speaking of plot points that need to be resolved, next week Jack goes into the jungle trying to trade for Walt, though "Henry" claims that the Others won't be buying. Then someone (was it Jack?) gets caught in a net.

s2e17: Lockdown

Just when you think Locke leads the show in bad-ass-ness (though mostly since we haven't had much Eko for a while), we get an episode like this, which features the typically emasculating Locke backstory, plus restores to Jack much of the bad-ass-ness he lost over the first whiny half of this season and gives Sayid a pretty awesome moment at the end of the show.

Can it really be considered a surprise that "Henry" is an Other? Probably not. The writers teased us on this one as much as any plot point all year, but he was always a little too dramatic, too good with names, too manipulative of his captors to just be some guy who crashed in a balloon. I had thought even after last week's teaser that it was possible that "Henry" had simply seen the balloon and built a story off of that; recall how convinced Sayid was that "Henry" would remember the depth had he truly buried his wife with his bare hands. He also had that number sequence a bit too down pat too quickly, didn't he?

But the real question now is this: just who are the Others? Are they a true part of the Dharma Initiative? I honestly can't say for certain just how much we learned about Dharma in this episode, although the apparent parachute of food and the lockdown of the hatch (not to mention Henry's evident ability to reset said lockdown) suggest that there is plenty of Dharma oversight on the castaways.

If the whole thing is just a bizarre social experiment, the lockdown certainly could have been intentionally triggered to give Locke a clue - that strange map, which appeared to me to be a drawing of various bunkers all over the island and a suggestion that they all had connections to a central point of some sort. The Others seem to have taken pains in the past to keep the castaways from getting too curious about certain things, though, so why they'd intentionally provide such a big clue now... I don't know. But then, there are a lot of things I don't know.

One important clue came from the teaser, where "Henry" cries that "He'll kill me" if he tells anything about his people. This is presumably the same "him" who is referenced in "Maternity Leave" when Zeke and that other guy are talking outside the room where Claire is being kept. Zeke himself appears to be the chief Other when they make outside appearances, so presumably this overseer is the big man in charge of either Dharma or whatever else might be going on.

I continue to feel that Dharma is not a sufficient explanation for all that happens on the island, though, and the film's concern with "incidents" would appear to be proof of that. Perhaps Dharma itself is part of a larger, more mystical connection - which might explain the various appearances of the numbers. Dharma may be working with the castaways they were given, but it still seems unlikely that they could have been responsible for bringing them all there in the first place. The various crossovers in flashback - Hurley owning Locke's company after winning the lottery, Sayid meeting Kate's not-quite-dad in Iraq, Shannon's father ending up in Jack's OR, Sawyer meeting Jack's dad in Australia (the only of these coincidences to date that the castaways are aware of, and done really, really well in a first-season episode) - cannot possibly have been driven by Dharma unless Alvar Hanso is also God, and it seems equally beyond their scope to have picked a few people and then tracked down a bunch of others to whom they were peripherally connected (at best) and then somehow made sure they were all in Australia at the same time.

We should only have five or six new episodes left this season (especially if the finale is two hours again, which seems quite possible); I'm hoping for a ton of fun new revelations. "Locke sees the map" is probably this season's "Locke finds the hatch" in terms of being used for a large section of the mystery plot in the final few episodes, but that's just a guess; the unmasking of "Henry" will surely contribute as well, unless Sayid actually just blows him away in the first five minutes next week.

Ach, I'm bad at this

Timely updating, that is. But here I am on Wednesday night, at least... I just have two episodes to discuss.

"Maternity Leave," the Claire episode, was interesting in a number of ways. First of all, it's the first episode to provide flashbacks that don't leave the island (the only other episode that messed with the main format was, of course, "The Other 48 Days," which had no flashbacks at all unless you count the entire episode). And those flashbacks did tell us a number of things about the Others. The second main thing was that this gave us, by far, our biggest clue about the Others ever. It basically gave us all the info we'd never gotten and then some. Among the things we now know:

1. The Others have some sort of medical facility, or at least they had one. Whatever it was, they were evidently capable of breaking it down in pretty short order.

2. The Others are, well, not the Others. They don't live in the jungle, they don't dress in loincloths, and they don't have real beards. (But they do have plenty of spirit gum.)

This second one is by far the most interesting to me. So if the Others are actually just some dudes in a building, where did they go? Is there a secret tarmac in the middle of the jungle that they use to jet back to Ann Arbor? And does the fact that they only appear to the castaways in the guise of jungle people (when not pretending to be castaways themselves) mean that they are part of some big sociological experiment? And if that's the case, what do they really need with Aaron, or Walt, or anyone they took? (Of course, the answer may well be "nothing, we're just seeing how people react." There's no way the Dharma Initiative is the whole story here, though.)

Meanwhile, Claire reaffirms her title as "Shrillest, Most Unpleasant Character on the Show." I know she's gone through a whole bunch of stuff, but she was always pretty obnoxious.

Speaking of Claire, weird Charlie appearance in tonight's episode, "The Whole Truth." He just gets to hang out with Sayid? I know Sayid is Captain Forgiving (see: Ana Lucia), but Charlie's outcast period sure doesn't seem to have lasted very long.

In the A plot, Sun thinks she's pregnant, and then she is. I really enjoyed the story; we got to see a lot of how Jin and Sun relate to each other and I liked Jin's emotional side coming out more. (His "Daddy-o" realization was really well done too, I have to say. I'm a sucker for little polished moments like that.)

In the B plot, Ana Lucia convinces Sayid (and Charlie) to go find Henry's balloon. Meanwhile, Henry acts as ominous as possible, which of course means he isn't an Other. Stupid TiVo cut off right as Henry has poured some Dharmios and is starting his ominous talk. Alma filled me in on the last minute or so, which was basically exactly what you'd expect - Henry finishing his dark "if I were an Other it would be so totally bad for you guys" spiel and then immediately giving a cheery "But I'm not, hooray!" Then I guess the teaser shows that the balloon is there.

So how is Sun pregnant? Well, there are a couple options.

1. Miracle baby! This one just seems silly, but stranger things have happened on this show. (Well, maybe nothing as strange as immaculate conception.)

2. Jin! Doctors aren't infallible.

3. Baldy! Come on, they were totally setting it up like Sun was going to do it with him. Her look of vague apprehension while hugging Jin could have been "I was lying about not doing it with someone else," though it could have been many other things as well. The one thing that I wonder about here is, not being a woman, I'm not intimately familiar with the potential timeline. Sun's been on the island around two months now - could she really have been pregnant the whole time and only finally noticed it now?

Well, yet more mysteries to unravel. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Previously on failure to update

Five episodes go by without comment here, and it would have been more if not for the month-and-a-half break over the holidays. Woof. So let's recap it all and hopefully this will jumpstart the thing again.

s2e10: The 23rd Psalm
Eko gets even more bad-ass, as his backstory reveals that he used to be a big time gangster who took over for his priest brother - and evidently did the legwork to be a serious priest himself, renouncing his old ways - after the latter was killed while trying to stop Eko from flying a bunch of drugs out of the country. The drugs? Heroin in Virgin Mary statues. Charlie? So busted. Meanwhile, Locke teaches Michael how to shoot a gun, the prelude to the terminally obnoxious Michael leaving the show for a number of weeks. Way to be, Locke!

s2e11: The Hunting Party
Michael goes all nuts and takes off in search of Walt; this is the last time we've seen him up to the present. Jack charges after him with Locke and Sawyer in tow. They run into the Others, who prove both their numbers and their mystery by lighting a bunch of torches. We also confirm that the guys on the boat who took Walt were definitely the Others. Meanwhile, Jack's backstory establishes the breakup of his marriage - essentially, Jack thinks he can help everyone, so he ignores his own wife while trying a risky surgery on an old Italian guy. The guy dies but his daughter wants to get in Jack's pants anyway; he rejects her but then his wife dumps him anyway. I wonder if he ran right to the airport after that hoping the Italian chick still wanted to do it. In the present, Jack returns from his meeting with the Others asking Ana Lucia about building an army. The Others skunk you every time, Jack! Such a bad, bad idea.

s2e12: Fire + Water
Quite simply the worst episode in the show's brief history. I daresay it isn't even close. Charlie goes all nuts even though he isn't on drugs, having weird dreams and kidnapping Claire's baby on multiple occasions. Ultimately, Locke beats the crap out of Charlie, which is only useful in setting up the following episode's final twist. The flashbacks tell us pretty much nothing as well, or at least I got nothing out of them. In the goofy side plot that must adorn all dramatic but not exciting episodes, Hurley hits on Libby for a while, to no avail.

s2e13: The Long Con
Someone apparently tries to kidnap Sun. Jack flips out and tries to get all the guns. Sawyer tells Locke, who moves them. Then it turns out that Sawyer was playing both Jack and Locke and ends up getting all the guns for himself with the help of (dun dun dun!!!!) Charlie, who didn't even do it for the drugs but because he wanted Locke to look stupid. The spur-of-the-moment rainstorm that makes the Sun not-quite-kidnap easier looks kind of odd if the Others with all their mysterious magical ways had nothing to do with it, though. Maybe Vincent and not Walt is the magical one? That would just be weird. The flashbacks in this episode were also so ridiculous. "Teach me how to con, Sawyer!" After she just (thought she) saw right through one of them? Feh. Sawyer's long con was at least cleverly layered, but what a crap setup for it.

s2e14: One of Them
Rousseau captures someone who might be an Other, but he claims to be some dude from Minnesota who crashed on the island in a hot air balloon. Sayid tries to get answers from him, but doesn't obtain anything concrete (though he maintains that any man who actually buried his wife with his bare hands would know more details about the burial, which hardly seems like a slam dunk). The guy does give one of those looks like the bad guys give on CSI when their guilt is revealed, so maybe he is an Other. The Others have shown a notorious resistance to talking about themselves, though, so does it even matter? Sayid's backstory shows where he learned his torture tactics - ironically (or not), it came from the Americans during the first Gulf War (and a pretty bad-ass Clancy Brown). Commentary on America's apparent pro-torture policy in Gulf War II? In this week's "we have to cut the drama with a goofy side plot," Sawyer convinces Hurley to chase a frog with him. Then Sawyer smushes the frog in his hand, which was both nasty and predictable, because every time the writers make Sawyer seem funny and likable for a while, they have to backtrack by reminding us all that he's a total asshole. How about just deciding one way or the other, guys?

Late in the episode we find out what happens when the timer runs out... nothing! Well, actually some weird symbols start showing up. But evidently they don't lock out the reset button, so it's just another clue piling up. I'm still a fan of the show, but I'm hoping that as we hit the stretch run - 8 to 10 more episodes to go this season - we finally start getting some answers, and not just question after question after question. Next week it looks like we might learn more about the Dharma Initiative's presence on the island... but probably it'll just leave more questions without answering much. We'll see.

And we're all caught up! So maybe now I can get back in the regular groove of post-episode posts.