Well, I finally scored on a prediction. Michael is confirmed as Ben’s guy on the boat. Like I said last week, I still don’t think is a great surprise and I wish we hadn’t had to wait seven episodes for it. The big problem with Lost’s experimental format is that if you keep leaving an audience hanging, sometimes for unbearably long amounts of time, there has to be a GREAT payoff. Sometimes it works, in cases like the revelation last season of how Dharma met its fate. And then again, sometimes it doesn’t. This isn’t the only bad payoff in this episode, but I’ll revisit this theme a little later…

I certainly appreciate Desmond getting the news that Whitmore is the man behind the expedition this early after the audience found out, just last episode. The Captain of the boat is quite interesting, especially how “forthcoming” he is, as Sayid says. Considering how secretive the whole expedition h as been, this was surprising, but welcome. On the other hand, it still begs the question of why they’re so secretive and what they still aren’t telling us. And although I think we could already infer that the “wreckage of Flight 815” found back in civilization was fabricated, it was nice to have a character confirm this. Perhaps the only big revelation in the episode, besides who the last member of the Oceanic Six is, is the idea that Ben had something to do with that fabrication. I never considered this, but I’m starting to think I should have. Is it possible he went to all that trouble just over his obsession with Juliet? He wouldn’t ever let her leave the island and why else would he want civilization to think there were no survivors?

In a lot of ways this is the best Jin/Sun episode of the series. As much as I never loved the Sun affair story I’m glad to see it concluded here and in a very sensible way. Juliet lets the cat out of the bag to Jin, but she apparently only does it to save Sun’s life (keeping her from joining Locke so she can get off the island before it kills her). Jin’s mad– who can blame him?– and it looks like it might be the end of their marriage. Then Bernard, of all people, calms him down and reminds him how hard but worth it marriage is. I doubt anyone with much investment in this series didn’t get a little misty eyed when Jin and Sun worked it out. A conflict that was beautifully executed and beautifully resolved.

Some of the drama is lost, of course, by the fact that we know Sun isn’t going to die because we see her flash-forwards and know she’s going to have her baby. This is another necessary evil of the format, I think, so I can mostly forgive it. But what I absolutely cannot forgive is the way flashbacks were mixed with flash-forwards simply to throw us off to the fact that Jin dies in the future.

I’ve come to appreciate big revelations from flash-forwards. They’re hard to follow, we never know exactly when they happen, but I’m getting used to it and it’s often quite worth it in the end. But this was the most pointless and obnoxious plot device I’ve ever seen– in any show whatsoever. Jin goes to buy a panda bear. It’s a cute scene because we’ve seen his wife in labor and assume it’s part of the same flash-forward. Then later he loses the bear in a taxi and goes back to get another one. It’s still cute but now we’re wondering why he’s so obsessive that it has to be a panda. Finally, when he shows up at the hospital, we find it’s for a client of his boss, Sun’s father. After all this heart-warming stuff, I the viewer am immediately crushed. I’m not hating it yet, though, because I think it’s a reveal– I think this is the show’s way of telling us Jin makes it off the island only to go back his crappy life again and Sun’s father comes before Sun.

Then, the unthinkable happens: he says he’s only been married two months. Two months? It’s a flashback! Suddenly it only serves as a way to screw with the audience and I’m quite offended by it. It contributes nothing to the plot, gives us nothing new about Jin’s character, and doesn’t even do anything to foreshadow his death, which might have almost made it worth it. And what was with Sun calling out for Jin during the delivery and a nurse saying he hadn’t arrived yet? We’re supposed to buy that she was calling for him and didn’t even realize it, but that’s a lame excuse– it was really just the writers trying to throw us off some more so that when Jin’s footage turns out to be a flashback, we’ll all be impressed and say how clever that was because we didn’t call it. No. It’s only clever if there are signposts and you still can’t call it, so that you can look back and say, “oh, I should’ve realized that!”

The final problem with it is that I knew something was fishy going on because now there were SEVEN survivors that made it back instead of six. It’ll be a little interesting to see how exactly he dies and if it’s on or off-island, but I hate the way it was revealed.

This does raise a question, of course. Despite the age of baby Aaron in Kate’s flashback (at least two) it seems people are going to have to get off the island now earlier than we were lead to believe the last few episodes. If Juliet’s right, Sun has to get off in three weeks or she’ll die, and she must, because we know she doesn’t die. This seems inconsistent to me. Sun has been pregnant for at least two or three months, so these flash-forwards are probably about four months from now. If Kate’s was a year or two from now, it doesn’t make sense, unless it really took that long for her to go to trial. Let me know if you have ideas on this because I’m quite confused.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: ABC, drama, Jin, Lost, Oceanic Six, science fiction, Sun, Television

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Capt Logan, Lost, Sci-Fi, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.