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.