Category: Lost (Page 18 of 29)

Holy crap, did that just really happen? I’m completely speechless, since it seemed Locke would be one of the few survivors who’d actually make it to the final season. Of course, it’s only a gut wound, so it is possible that he’ll still live, but the sheer fact that Ben shot him point blank in cold blood definitely made for one hell of a cliffhanger. We certainly know that he’s capable of it (especially after learning all about his childhood on the island), and when you think about it, he was only protecting his place among the Others.

It’s funny to think that with only ten minutes left in the episode, I had already written the first line of the blog. It read: “Is it just me or has Locke officially regained his status as the island’s baddest badass after tonight’s episode.” It was in reference to Locke just beating poor Mikhail (who we learned didn’t die because the pylons weren’t set to lethal levels) to a pulp; and right in front of all the Others, no less. I don’t know what it is, but the Others seem to really respect Locke, and Ben is obviously threatened by that notion.

And so when Ben takes Locke to see Jacob (at the latter’s request, despite Ben’s assurance that “This is not a man you go to see. This is a man who summons you.”), it seemed like something (anything!) was going to go down. I just didn’t know what. When they arrive at Jacob’s place, Ben begins talking to an empty rocking chair with no visible person in sight. Locke thinks he’s simply being jerked around by Ben, but then things get all crazy ghostlike and Jacob speaks a few words… that Locke can actually hear. This doesn’t please Ben at all – since he led himself to believe that he was the only one who could communicate with him – and so, after shooting him in the stomach, Ben forces Locke to tell him what he said. It was two simple words: help me, which, coming from Locke, only made it all that more appropriate. Here’s hoping someone does, or I’d expect some serious backlash from the fans.

The rest of the episode was dedicated to Ben (in flashback form, of course – thank you kind sirs), and we learned quite a bit that helps to understand the man we all thought we knew. First off, he’s the son of an asshole. After his mother died while giving birth to him in the middle of the woods, his father (Jon Gries) takes him to the island where he’s been given a job as a janitor. Yep, that’s right – Ben’s father is Roger the Work Man, the dead guy that the A-Team happened upon in the blue VW van earlier in the season. Anyways, in between working a shitty job and drinking a lot of alcohol, Roger doesn’t find much time for his son. He constantly forgets his birthday because, as he puts it, “it’s kinda hard to celebrate the day you killed your mom.” Ouch, that hurts.

Flash-forward many, many years, and after dropping off some rations at the Pearl station, Roger attempts to rekindle a relationship by spending some long-awaited father-son time. It’s Ben’s birthday, again, but instead of nagging his father like previous years, he goes a different route, snapping on a gas mask and pulling the pin out of a gas grenade while the two are sitting in the VW van. Roger dies a very, very painful death, while Ben returns to discover most of the Others dead by the same means. It appears he was part of a coup to wipe out all of the weaker Others (joining Richard, the new Other we met last week), and this is how he rose to power within the camp.

Meanwhile, as Ben protects his leadership position by offing the one guy who the Others respect more, Sawyer returns to camp with evidence of Juliet’s treachery. It turns out Jack already knew about the raid (as Juliet told him a day before), but that didn’t exactly make the rest of the camp trust him any more. Not much happened past that, but it’s definitely an excellent catalyst for what looks to be yet another jaw-dropping finale.

If there was ever a moment when that crazy Purgatory theory actually held some weight in the long run of the series, it was tonight. I still don’t believe it’s a credible theory (since the writers already came out and said so), but we’ve all been duped before, and I’m not prepared to cross it off my list of possibilities any time soon.

Tonight’s episode featured less of a conventional flashback, dating back only five days when Locke was last shown the contests of the magical box. It was his father, Anthony Cooper, of course, and as a gesture of good faith to The Others, Ben orders Locke to kill him. When faced with the chance to do so, however, Locke backs down, and Ben exclaims that he’s “not who [they] thought he was.” When another Other suggests that Locke convince someone else to do the dirty deed, he finds the perfect man for the job.

Enter Sawyer. He’s just cashed in on a late-night booty call with Kate, and though he’d much rather spend the night with her, he sets off on a late night stroll instead. It’s there that Locke confronts him about the opportunity to kill Ben (who he says he’s just kidnapped), and while Sawyer would rather just bring him back to camp alive, Locke assures him that he’ll a change of heart after listening to what Ben has to say.

It wasn’t the least surprising to discover Cooper there instead of Ben, except perhaps for Sawyer, who’s never seen this man before in his life. As soon as Locke mentioned that little tidbit about reading Sawyer’s file (not the killing part, but the family history part) and then mentioned his possible change of heart, I just knew that Cooper was going to end up being the real Sawyer – the man that not only seduced and conned James Sawyer’s mother, but also led to his father’s murder-suicide. As you’d expect, Sawyer just happens to have that letter he wrote to Cooper when he was a young boy, and he makes him read it aloud. Cooper doesn’t seem all that sorry about what he’s done (dude’s pure evil), perhaps because he seems to think he’s already in Hell. And if he isn’t, well, Sawyer took care of that when he choked him to death.

On a side note, did anyone find it strange that when Rousseau arrived at the Black Rock (where Locke was holding Sawyer and Cooper) to pick up some more dynamite that she didn’t interject at all? She definitely heard Sawyer’s screams for help, but I guess if anyone on that island understands what Locke is doing, it’d be her.

Anyways, at least Sawyer got something out of the forced murder. Locke tips Sawyer off about the incoming raid (and that Juliet is a mole), handing him the tape recorder as proof. This is definitely going to land Juliet in hot water over on Survivor Island (not to mention Jack, as well), so it’ll be interesting to see what happens during these last three weeks. And speaking of Jack, it looks like he finally knows about the mystery girl, Naomi. Despite the A-Team choosing to tell Sayid instead of Jack (because they just can’t trust him now that he’s been seen fraternizing with the enemy), Kate eventually found out and spilled the details. That seems like a pretty dumbass move (something Hurley would do, you know?), but maybe it’s all part of Desmond’s big-picture strategy. Only time will tell…

The title of tonight’s post (as well as tonight’s episode) refers to the medial term for “Date of Conception,” which, for someone like Sun, holds a lot of weight in her current situation. If the baby was conceived before she arrived on the island, it’s not Jin’s (but rather bald Korean dude’s). If it was conceived after arriving, then not only is it a miracle (because Jin was diagnosed as being infertile), but it means that Sun is more or less guaranteed to die. She learns all this through Juliet who, despite clearly working for the Others, can’t help but help the distressed mother-to-be.

In order to check up on her current status, Juliet escorts Sun to a secret room in the medial complex previously discovered by Kate and Claire. It’s there that Sun realizes the lose-lose situation she’s been thrust into, but if Jin’s sperm count can be magically increases by just residing on the island, than I can’t help but think that Sun has a fighting chance. Of course, Juliet may have other plans for Sun – or at least that’s what we’re being led to believe after she returned to the medical hatch to record a message for Ben disclosing all the details about the miracle pregnancy.

We also got another glimpse into Sun’s past to discover, well, nothing very exciting. As soon as I saw the woman bribing her with the threat of revealing the true identities of Jin’s parents, I knew that it was his supposedly dead mother. It turns out she was a prostitute back in the day, and though she gave birth to Jin, it turns out she doesn’t give a damn about him. Jin’s father (who Sun also visits in the flashback) feels a little differently, and we learn that while he never knew if Jin really was his son, he still raised him like one. Boo hoo, we don’t care.

Moving on to more exciting things, the A-Team – that’s my new name for Desmond (Hannibal), Charlie (Faceman, though this should really be Sawyer), Jin (Mr. T) and Hurley (Howling Mad) – have just found the mystery woman up in the trees only to discover that she’s dying from a fatal wound in her side. And just as Desmond sets off to find help, Mikhail (AKA Eye-Patch Man) accidentally crosses their path. Wait a minute. Isn’t this guy supposed to be dead? Hurley sure thinks so, and he even mentions this fact to Mikhail, only to get no answer in return. Hmm, maybe the electric fence is just a sham, but that wouldn’t exactly explain how it stopped the smoke monster a few weeks back.

Anyway, with Mikhail in their possession, Desmond makes a deal that will allow him to go free as long as he helps with the mystery woman. He lives up to his end of the deal and the A-Team let him go, but Jin chases him down soon after to discover that Mikhail has stolen the inoperative SAT phone. You gotta love Jin. Dude always knows when things aren’t right, and he’s probably the best fighter of all the men on the island. While Desmond and Jin deal with the situation, Hurley gets a little face time with the mystery girl, and after mentioning that he’s one of many survivors from a plane crash, she looks at him in absolute disbelief. It seems that the Oceanic Flight 815 crash site has already been discovered, but everyone was dead.

We already know that the Purgatory theory has been officially rejected by the show’s writers, and it no longer makes sense now that we’ve been introduced to Juliet, so what the hell is going on? I’m sure we’ll have to wait until the season finale to find out, but that only makes the buildup that much sweeter.

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.

It’s always nice when you can watch an episode of “Lost” and actually feel like you know what’s going on, and though not as many secrets were revealed as they wanted you to believe, it was still one of the best of the season.

When I realized that this was going to be a Juliet-centric episode, it seemed strange that they would do another flashback for her so soon, but then I looked back at the previous fifteen episodes and noticed that it’s actually been quite some time since we first learned about anti-Kate. Of course, if they’re going to start featuring character-specific episodes for the Others, then I’d really like to see them highlight Ben next. Plus, I’m beginning to wonder if the guy from Portland is Jacob.

Getting back to the story at hand, the flashback sequences may not have been any longer than most weeks, but they were certainly more informative. It picks up practically right where it left off, with Juliet arriving at the secret Portland company and preparing for departure to the island. Before hand, however, she’s given a quick physical and a tranquilizer-laced OJ to make the trip go by quicker. Um, I’m sorry, but the minute someone tells me that my tasty fruit drink is going to knock me out, and then doesn’t follow up with “just kidding,” I’m outta there. Nonetheless, Juliet drinks up, and when she awakes, she’s already arrived at the island – courtesy of the submarine.

Along with learning more about her purpose on the island, Juliet’s flashback (and her explanation to Jack and Kate, coincidentally) covers events from past seasons, but fills in gaps. Like how the Others know so much about the survivors (Mikhail gets all the info via some command center in Portland), or why Ethan was planted in the camp. It seems they knew all about Claire’s pregnancy, and since no woman on the island had gotten pregnant without dying, she was a bit of a medical miracle. So, Ethan began secretly administering a vaccine to keep her healthy, but when he was discovered not to be on the flight manifest, he abandoned his orders and kidnapped Claire.

Speaking of Claire, she’s not looking so good these days, and after Juliet learns of her condition, she runs off into the woods to bring back some medicine. Hours later and, wah-lah, Claire’s all better. Thanks, of course, to Juliet. And just when we’re led to believe that Juliet truly is part of the gang, we’re treated to one final flashback of her and Ben discussing how she’s really going undercover as a mole. Dum dum dum. That’s right, folks. Juliet was faking it all along, right from the minute she awoke in the woods, handcuffed to Kate. Does this mean that the Others really are evil, or is Juliet’s job related to something completely different. Like perhaps Sun, whose recent pregnancy is looking a little more dangerous now that we’ve learned the fate of past mothers-to-be. Whatever the answer, we know it’s only going to take one week…