After last week’s good but not great Locke-centric show, it probably wasn’t the best idea to air another character-heavy episode so soon. That hasn’t stopped the powers that be from doing just that, however, and though it probably won’t go down as one of the season’s stronger stories, it was still a solid, more traditional hour of “Lost” that finally gave Sawyer his day in the sun. Fortunately, he’s also currently one of the best characters on the show thanks to his recent pairing with fellow island dumpee, Juliet.
The two of them have quickly assumed leadership of the B-Team since, well, Jin still can’t talk very much English, Miles is a total slacker, and Faraday is mourning the death of Charlotte. With Locke gone and no sign of the well even having been built yet (though did anyone notice the four-toed statue being erected in the background?), the island is moved one final time before, as expected, it stops for good. From here, the episode shuffled back and forth in time from their newest location to three years into the future, where they currently exist when the Oceanic 6 return to the island.
Over those three years, the B-Team somehow managed to warm their way into the hearts of the Dharma Initiative and become full-fledged members. Granted, we never actually find out how that happened (which was probably why I felt so lukewarm about the episode when it ended), but we do know that they’re stuck sometime in the 1970s and that Sawyer in particular (now going by the name Jim LaFleur) has become somewhat of a leader in the camp. He’s not the leader, mind you, but after saving the life of a woman named Amy (played by Reiko Aylesworth, who will now be referred to as Michelle Dessler) and smoothing out a broken truce between Dharma and the Others, Sawyer wins his place among them.
I loved that when Richard Alpert arrived at the camp, the first thought out of everyone’s mind was “Uh oh,” but not nearly as much as when Sawyer made a reference to Alpert as “your friend with the eyeliner”; no doubt an in-joke by the writing staff about Nestor Campbell. I can’t remember exactly when it was that the Others took over, but you can be sure that Sawyer and the rest of the gang know that it’s only a matter of time when they do. Curiously, while the Dharma workers have always seemed to be less hostile than the Others, Michelle Dessler turned out to be one sneaky bitch. One minute she’s tricking the B-Team into walking through the activated pylons, and the next minute, she’s telling Juliet to slice her belly open in order save her baby. Oh, what a few years can do for the soul. (On a side note, how great is it that Jin can now speak decent English?)
We may not have learned how Sawyer and Co. managed to finagle their way into a long-term position working for Dharma, but we did get to experience the island’s first-ever successful baby birth (prompting the question, “What the hell went wrong?”) and the inevitable coupling of Sawyer and Juliet. The writers have been hinting at this for quite some time now, but now that it’s finally here, are they really going to break it up so soon? I actually prefer those two together than that ungodly mess of a love triangle between Jack, Kate and Sawyer. In fact, when Sawyer delivered that speech about how he barely even remembers what Kate looks like, it gave me hope that his new relationship might not be tampered with. And then she had to come back, and well, it’s looking awfully certain that Juliet might become a dumpee yet again. Oh well, I guess there are worse things that could happen.
