s3e21: Greatest Hits

I'll be honest: for the penultimate episode of Season Three, I was really hoping for more. This was mostly an hour of setup for the finale, and while I can't totally complain - in some ways it's just a three-hour finale split over two nights - I thought we might get a little more. Instead, we got:

* "Here are the exact specifications of Jack's plan!"
* "Here are the exact specifications of Ben's plan!"
* "Here is a Charlie backstory that serves no purpose other than to convince you he's going to die, even though any reasonable person could have realized that they would never kill him off in so obvious a fashion!"
* "Here are ten seconds of significant interest, just to wet your beaks for next week!"

Really, the last ten seconds weren't even that interesting, by this show's standards. They showed us that the Looking Glass is still staffed. Presumably it's staffed by Others; so what does this tell us? Obviously it's likely to be explained in the finale, but I would assume that there's some kind of "Ben has way the crap more contact with the outside world than he's telling anyone" thing coming. The whole show seems to be trending towards a fall for Ben; there's clearly a faction within the Others that is upset with his leadership and it's not just Juliet, regardless of what was implied by her trial early this season. Whether that's what the "everything will change" tagline means, obviously I don't know, but if I had a couple bucks to put down in Vegas I'd lean that way, especially with Jacob looking to Locke for help. (However, Lindelof and Cuse said on last week's official podcast that Jacob was more of a fourth-season story, so my question becomes: are we even likely to see Locke next week? Maybe near the end of the show? I had read something saying that the season finale would involve a clash between Jack and Locke - which makes sense since Locke doesn't want to leave the island - but that seems less likely now, doesn't it? Unless maybe they run into him on the trek to the radio tower...)

I will say that Charlie's Sydney Carton moment was one of the better single moments for the show in the last two years, so at least there was that. Otherwise, though, this was mostly "an hour that's not the finale." I'm looking forward to those two hours, myself. Let's hope it's better than last year's.