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.