With the tension still building around Charlie’s supposedly imminent death, I thought the time had finally come after seeing that arrow pierce his neck in the opening minutes of the episode. Then I realized that Desmond was probably just having one of his crazy flashes and, alas, I was right. Still, if you’re going to be written off of a show, that’s definitely the way to go. I’m still hoping that someone figures out a way to break Charlie’s island death curse, but if they do decide to kill him, we’d better get something twice as cool as that. No lazy gunshot wounds or dragged-out death scenes. Something quick and to the point, and perhaps most importantly, shocking as hell.
The rest of the episode was pretty tame, but I really dug that the flashback sequences were kept to a minimum. The action that takes place on the island is far more interesting than what happened to these characters before they arrived, and with the season finale rapidly approaching, it’d be wise to keep the background story to a minimum. As such, we didn’t really learn too much about Desmond than we already knew. However, we did discover a few things:
1) Desmond was a monk (for like a week), before getting kicked out
2) That’s why he says “brother” so much
3) A fellow monk believes that God has “much bigger plans” for him
4) He was once engaged to marry a girl named Ruth
5) He met Penelope while loading cases of wine into her car
That’s about it on the flashback front, but after experiencing the aforementioned prophecy of Charlie dying in the woods, Desmond sets out to recruit the same survivors (Charlie, Hurley and Jin) that were with him on the trek across the jungle so that nothing about the future changes. Including the helicopter crash that they all experience while telling campfire stories on the shore, and the body that comes parachuting out of it. Desmond thinks it’s Penny, and his belief is almost confirmed when they find an abandoned backpack in the woods with a dead satellite phone, a copy of “Catch-22” (in German?), and a picture of Desmond and Penny.
And then it happens: Charlie steps on the tripwire and activates the arrow, but this time Desmond pushes him out of the way. The look on Charlie’s face is priceless, and you could say that he’s more than a little pissed off that Desmond hid that little nugget from him in order to coerce him to join the journey. Still, Charlie’s safe, and that’s gotta make him feel a little better. It doesn’t take much longer to find the pilot hanging from her parachute in a tree, but when he removes the helmet, it’s not Penny starring back at Desmond, but rather some exotic woman who knows his name. I thought it was Ruthie at first (why would they bother with that subplot if they weren’t going to revisit it later on, but that definitely wasn’t her). Who it is we still don’t know, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out in the coming weeks.
