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.