Wednesday, March 07, 2007

s3e10: Tricia Tanaka is Dead

If February sweeps are over, that means it must be time for a wacky midseason episode that's generally fun but tells us nothing. And how better to do that than with a Hurley plot? Hurley finds a car and wants to drive it, and spends the episode bouncing between flashbacks that would make Steven Spielberg proud with their daddy issues and trying to convince Jin, Sawyer and Charlie to help him get the car working. At the end of the episode, they do, and Hurley does some donuts in a field. It was a pleasant episode, and I know not every episode is going to give you many answers, but it seems like this show has left far too many strings hanging to dick around like this, even in midseason. In the first season, when there were fewer questions, character episodes were great. Now they just feel annoying, even when they're good. Aside from the reunion scene, the coda, and the few fleeting references in the middle, this really did feel more like a first-season episode - not that there's anything wrong with that. The first season feels more all the time like the only classic season this show is going to end up generating - it's still interesting from week to week, don't get me wrong, but it's just not the same.

In the only part of the episode that's even remotely relevant to anything else, Kate goes off to find Rousseau (predictable from the moment she strode into the jungle, as if she was going to be off to hunt Cap'n Eyepatch). Rousseau proves just as surly as ever, but mellows out when Kate reveals the "surprise" that the Alex we've been seeing with the Others is the same Alex who's Rousseau's daughter. Oh, really? Thanks for putting that at the end of an episode like it's a shocking cliffhanger, show. I'm more than a little tired of the only mysteries getting answered being the ones that everyone had already guessed the answer to anyway.

The upcoming episode at least looks interesting, but I bet it asks more questions than it answers. Why shouldn't it?

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