Lost: Wherein a Bunch of Stuff Happens

Okay, so here’s the thing.  A lot happens in any given episode of Lost.  People get shot with poison darts.  They get sued.  They come back from the dead.  They have seizures, they get better.  They hint at mysteries from their pasts, they make poor grooming decisions, they time-travel.  No matter how hard I try to summarize, I’m never going to get it all.  Especially since when I look back over my raw notes after watching an episode I often realize that I just wrote four pages about how irritating Juliet is and how much I adore Sun’s wardrobe.

So I’m not going to try to hit on every point from this week’s episode.  After all, last week, despite my best efforts, I managed to leave out the big cliffhanger from the end of the episode, where Charlotte almost died and stuff.  So this time, let’s just hit on some of the episode’s highs and lows and takeaways, shall we?

The basics: It’s another split episode – half time-traveling on the island, half in L.A. circa 2007.  On the island, our motley group of non-Oceanic Sixers walks and boats around, trying to get to the Orchid station despite their ongoing time jumping, because Locke thinks he can leave the island from there.  But by the end of the ep they still haven’t made it.  In L.A., Kate spends the episode evading a mysterious foe who’s trying to get custody of Aaron.  She finally realizes it’s Ben, and the Oceanic Six minus Hurley plus Mr. Linus assembles at a pier.  Except that Sun is packing iron.  Go Sun!

The good:

• Jin’s alive!  Hooray!
• Kate borrows an outfit and a hair straightener from Sun. (This was a major highlight of the ep for me.  She looked fabulous.)
• Graham Chase is in a lot of scenes, and he’s really cool and menacing.  And he’s friends with Ben!  Awesome.
• Sayid totally sees through Ben’s good-guy act.  I love it.  I love that only Jack is taken in by Ben’s schemes.  Also, we get to see Sayid ninja some more, which is always fun.
• Hurley looks hilarious in his prison jumpsuit.  I normally find the fat-guy jokes on this show borderline offensive, but that shot was hysterical.
• At one point the islanders find a random canoe-type-thing (I don’t know, I don’t do boats) and go paddling off into some unconvincing green screen shots, and then someone starts shooting at them from another boat/canoe thing, and they have no idea who’s shooting or what time they’re in or who they’re allied with or anything.  “Are these your people?” Sawyer shouts.  “No, are they yours?” Juliet shouts back.  It was funny.
• And, we get to see the original Rousseau shipwreck from 16 years ago!  I hope we get one of these neato historical tidbits every episode.  I hope we get to see Ellie again soon, too.

The bad:

• It’s a Kate episode.  But oh well, we might as well get it over with now, while she’s still in L.A. and looking all well-styled.
• Juliet is useless some more.  Remember how Charlotte had a seizure, and Juliet is a doctor?  Apparently the proper treatment for seizure patients is staring at them and being rude to Daniel, because that’s all Juliet does. (Fortunately Charlotte gets better on her own.  Also, she has really pretty eyes.  I never noticed that before.)
• We see boring flashbacks of Jack and Kate on Penny’s boat when they were figuring out what to do about Aaron.  I still don’t buy the Kate character arc that made her decide to adopt Aaron.  I think it was just a neat story twist they decided to thrown in last season.  But it was neat enough that I won’t quibble about it.
• We have to watch Sawyer whine about how he misses Kate, and, even worse, we get more Sawyer/Juliet foreshadowing.
• The islanders go back in time to season 1, and since it’s a Kate-focused episode, we have to watch Kate deliver Claire’s baby.  Oh, what-ever.  If we had to be in season 1 there are so many cooler things we could’ve watched again.  Remember when they hung Charlie?  And when Sayid hooked up with Maggie Grace?  And when Locke used to be interesting?
• The actress playing the younger Rousseau is not as good as the original Rousseau.  But I’m so happy to have the character back that I don’t care.

The stuff that will matter next week:

• Miles and Juliet start having nose bleeds, like Charlotte did last week.  Daniel deduces that their brains are being affected by the time travel, and that the onset of symptoms is based on how long they’ve been on the island.  So Charlotte has been on the island longest, followed by Miles, followed by Juliet.  That’s pretty interesting, actually.
• Graham Chase promises Ben he’ll get Hurley out of jail quickly.  So the Oceanic Six will soon be in a position to fulfill Ms. Hawking’s 70-hours timetable.  If Sun doesn’t succeed in killing Ben, that is.
• As aforementioned, Jin’s alive!  Rousseau’s crew sees him lying on some driftwood and pulls him out of the water.  They try to interrogate him in French-accented English, which doesn’t work out well, especially since he’s in shock and badly burned and has been in the water quite a while.  He looks terrible, even worse than that time he turned into a zombie.  But he’s alive, yay!

Season 5, Episode 4: The Little Prince (originally aired February 4, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out Are the Seventy Hours Over Yet? by J.B. Perlow.

For more on Lost, click here.

Wednesdays, 9/8c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC