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s4e12: There's No Place Like Home, Part 1

We get our earliest flash-forward yet, as it starts with the Oceanic Six on the plane about to land in Hawaii. I'm beginning to suspect (well, maybe not beginning) that the end of this season might do something like connect the "present" to the "flash-forwards" (in other words, could it possibly end with the same scene that this episode started with, or with what happens directly before it?). But as we've seen before, I am horrible at guessing where this show is going next.

Anyway, in flash-forward, we see that Sayid and Nadia get together; Hurley sees the numbers in the odometer of the car his dad fixed and freaks out; Sun somehow gets so much money from Oceanic that she can buy majority control of her dad's company (seriously? I didn't realize Paik Industrial was a lemonade stand), as she blames him for Jin's death; and Jack finally delivers the eulogy at his father's funeral, only to be told by a no-longer-comatose Claire's mom that Claire was/is his sister. I've long wondered how and when they were going to present this news to Jack, and I have to say it went off pretty well. Also have to love the irony they squeeze in there; Claire's mom mentions how Jack would have been a few rows from Claire without ever knowing she was his sister, then compliments Aaron to Kate, of course not realizing that he's really her grandson.

In present times, Jack and Kate go into the jungle after hearing that Keamy is headed for the Orchid. Kate swaps with Sawyer after they run into him (with Aaron and Miles in tow), and Sawyer and Jack make for the chopper. When Frank (cuffed to the chopper by Keamy) tells them that Locke and Hurley are probably going to be killed when Keamy finds Ben, Jack heads for the Orchid.

Meanwhile, Sayid arrives at the beach to get people off the island. When Kate arrives at the beach, she and Sayid head back into the jungle to warn Jack about how dangerous the mercenaries on the helicopter are; Kate leaves Aaron with Sun. In the jungle, Kate and Sayid are ambushed and captured by Richard Alpert and the rest of the Others. (I kind of wonder why those guys still bother to wear those outfits when everyone on the island knows they don't really live in huts or whatever; possibly something necessary due to one of the various mythological island factors?)

In lieu of Sayid, Daniel starts ferrying people back to the boat. Michael has fixed the engines, but due to some interference, the sonar isn't working properly, so the helmsman refuses to move the boat closer to the island (lest it run aground on the reef). When Desmond and Michael look for the source, they find a room full of explosives. Some connection here between this and the device on Keamy's arm?

Ben, Locke and Hurley make their way to the Orchid (Ben has some communication with the other Others by mirror first), which is already surrounded by the mercenaries. After telling Locke what to do to move the island once he's inside the Orchid, Ben surrenders himself, and Keamy hits him in the face with his gun (he apparently really likes doing this).

Two-hour second part of the finale coming on May 29. So what can we expect? Well, someone will probably be dying; the likelihood of Jin's survival in one form or another seems slim at this point, but I think Desmond will survive because of the integral part he has to play in the Ben/Widmore battle. Not sure about Michael; possibly he would sacrifice himself to save everyone else? Will the island actually move? And if so, will it move to the location of "Membata," or are the castaways moved there first, or is that entirely a fish story? With the various members of the Oceanic Six in four different places at the moment - Sun and Aaron on the freighter, Sayid and Kate with the Others, Jack heading for the Orchid, and Hurley at the Orchid - how exactly are they all going to be pulled together and yet no one else will be saved? It's seemed for a while that some sort of deal will be cut by the six who do get off, but why those six, and what kind of deal, and with whom?

Excited.

s4e11: Cabin Fever

A plot: Locke, Hurley and Ben go looking for Jacob's cabin.

This plot really kind of mixed the amusing and the creepy. Just look at the first scene where they're arguing about who's leading the way, or where Hurley splits his Apollo Bar with Ben... then, at the same time, look at, well, the entire scene in the cabin, or Locke's dream sequence where Horace tells him how to find the cabin. (It turns out that Horace built the cabin, apparently.) Oh, and Locke's very literal use of "pit stop" made me smile.

Anyway, Christian (dead) and Claire (not dead?) are inside the cabin, and they tell Locke what he needs to do - move the island. What in the fuck?

B plot: Various confrontations on the boat as Keamy plans to return to the island in force.

A very tense, action-heavy plot. Keamy comes back and confronts Michael for ratting him out to Ben, but the gun misfires when he tries to kill him. (Michael is impervious right now, apparently.) Keamy gets the "secondary protocol," which apparently tells him the only place Ben can go to hide if the island is "torched." Captain Overacting doesn't exactly agree with Keamy's plan and gives Sayid (and Desmond, who elects not to return to the island) a boat. Also, we see the ship receive the Morse code message about Dr. Ecklie, who's still alive and well - and then he's killed and tossed overboard. So clearly there's a big time issue here. In a big confrontation, Captain Overacting is shot by Keamy, and Frank decides to fly them back to the island after initially resisting. Meanwhile, Keamy has had some odd device attached to him, which I'm sure will come into play later.

C plot: In our brief view of the beach, Jack et al. receive the radio/GPS that Frank drops. Aaaand that's about it.

Flashback: In our first full pre-crash flashback since the second-to-last episode of Season Three (Charlie's "Greatest Hits"), we learn significant and confusing information about Locke's long-term ties to the island's mythology.

So Baby Locke was ridiculously premature but he managed to battle off all kinds of infections and survive. Then we see - dum dum DUM! - Richard Alpert, who visits Baby Locke in the hospital and then Kid Locke, giving the latter some sort of Dalai Lama test, as Drew noted. Kid Locke fails, but that's clearly not the end of it, as Mittelos Bioscience tries to recruit Teen Locke, who might have gone for it if he'd been getting laid. Sadly, he's unpopular, and rejects the idea as he has no intention of being more unpopular. Finally, we see Wheelchair Locke during his rehab, where he meets with - dum dum DUM!!!! - Matthew Abaddon, who, we discover, is responsible for planting the idea in Locke's head that he should go on the walkabout.

So the question thus is: did Matthew Abaddon, who appears to be on the Widmore side later, point Locke towards Australia because he knew Locke's plane would crash, ridding the world of the Others' "chosen one?" Or because he knew it would crash in such a way that Locke would get to the island? Either way, how did and could he know? And the whole "when you and me run into each other again, you'll owe me one" - time traveling? Or just knowing the future somehow?

All in all, a pretty strong episode. Now we just have three hours of finale left over the next three weeks (one, off, two). Can you say awesome?

s4e10: Something Nice Back Home

When you consider the fact that three episodes (though, ultimately, only two hours) had to be dropped from this season, doesn't that make "Something Nice Back Home" feel like kind of a missed opportunity? Let's run down the major plot points of the episode really quick.

A plot: Jack gets appendicitis and Juliet has to perform surgery.

Has there ever been a Lost plot with less inherent tension? We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jack survives well into the future. So the only thing that we really gleaned from this entire segment came at the end, when Juliet reveals that she knows Jack really loves Kate, in spite of the seemingly blossoming relationship between Jack and Juliet.

B plot: Sawyer, Claire and Miles head back to the beach, run into Frank (and have to hide from a shaken-but-alive Keamy), come across the bodies of Rousseau and Karl, and have Sawyer claim the "overly-protective of Claire, to no benefit" mantle from the late Charlie. Claire winds up vanishing, leaving Aaron behind, having apparently gone off with Christian, who was certainly corporeal but about whom we can't say much else with certainty.

I guess this plot was fine, but the Keamy thing was kind of cheap tension (since it turned out to be window dressing) and the final scene was frustratingly inconclusive even by Lost standards. Miles has calmed down a lot in the few days he's been on the island, though, hasn't he?

C plot: Charlotte turns out to speak Korean, and Jin asks her to make sure Sun gets off the island.

Again, this seemed fairly irrelevant, other than setting up Sun getting off the island while Jin does not - but that's also something we already knew and obviously doesn't even come close to answering the main question about that plotline, which is: Is Jin secretly still alive, and if not, how does he die? We'll probably find that out by the end of the season, one would suspect, but at any rate this added very little to the effort.

FF plot: Overcoming his reservations about Aaron, Jack begins a serious relationship with Kate, eventually proposing to her. But the seeds of the relationship's downfall are sown when Jack goes to see Hurley at the mental hospital, where Hurley passes along a message from Charlie: "You're not supposed to raise him." Jack begins to see his father and eventually starts drinking again, finally confronting Kate about who she's been off to see behind his back. It turns out she's been running errands or something for Sawyer. By the end of the episode it's pretty clear how we got to the point Jack was at in last season's finale.

This was probably the best part of the episode, which is kind of sad because the idea of Jack and Kate being all lovey-dovey in the future - even if the entire scope of their relationship fit into this episode - really sort of bothers me. The scene between Jack and Hurley was really well-shot, though, and the introduction of Sawyer back into the mix was interesting although fairly implausible. (Jack wants to kill himself because he can't find the island, but Sawyer, apparently still there, can just pick up a phone and call Kate whenever he wants? I guess we've established that voice transmissions aren't affected by the island's power while the jamming is off, but it seems odd somehow.) You also wonder what Kate is even doing for Sawyer - something related to his daughter? The end of the flash-forward also all but confirmed what we suspected based on "Eggtown" - that Jack has, at some interim point, found out that Claire is actually his half-sister (as his rant that Kate isn't even related to Aaron was dripping with "While I, on the other hand, am" implication). When he finds that out seems to be up for quite a lot of debate; I would have assumed that Christian would have confirmed this for Jack at some point, but given how shocked he is to see his father off-island in the FF here, I can't believe that he would have spoken to his father (or any avatar thereof) to be able to find that out. Perhaps he finds out from Ben at some point, or perhaps he finds out after getting off the island from some sort of investigation into the lives of people on the plane (done by whoever seems like they might do that and publicize it). I don't really know at this point but it appears it's not Christian.

Next week: do you realize that there is only one episode remaining before the start of the two-part finale on May 15? Of course, the finale is three hours over two nights (two weeks apart, no less), so it's not like we're going to be hurting for Lost over the next month, but we're really coming right up against it here. Hard to believe that episode 11 is going to tread as much water as this one did, with that in mind.