Review: Lost 4.7: Ji Yeon

Note: If you want to understand these reviews, I'd direct you to Lostpedia's Season Four portal. All of the images in my Lost reviews have been taken from Lostpedia, and the plot there goes into greater detail.

Jin and Sun, having the same conversation every year.

Jin and Sun aren't a particularly interesting couple in the long run; the potential is there, of course: a low-level businessman winning the heart of his boss's daughter and transforming as her "betrayels" make him into a better partner and all-round human being. That sounds all well and good on paper, but in practice it often seems like the writers of their episodes follow the same basic pattern and adapt it to fit the context of the season. Luckily, for Ji Yeon the writers have used the format to spice things up a little bit on the sides, as well as giving us a few trips to Sayid and Desmond's progress on the freighter.
     On island, and this is an episode where remarkebly little happens in a very short space of time. Following the pattern with these episodes, Sun upsets Jin. Jin gets upset. Jin forgives Sun and both learn from the experience. It isn't much to ask in a series with as much scope as this one to at least vary the interaction between these two characters - this edition added in a few loose ends from Season Three like Sun's affair (which ultimately has very little effect on the overall story between the two).
     Sayid and Desmond, on the other hand, are getting somewhere on the freighter - they have a meeting with the boat's Captain, who explains that they're supposedly here to find out who planted the false wreckage of 815, who they've been led to believe is Ben Linus (but as we'll later find out, is their employer Charles Widmore).This sublot was the most interesting, merely due to the fact that something significant to the plot happened within it; notably, Ben's spy on the boat was revealed as ex-Survivor Michael who betrayed his friends in Season Two for a boat off the island.

Michael reappears, as "Kevin Johnson"

     Ji Yeon's main area of interest is the flash timeline. For the majority of the episode we are led to believe that we're looking at a flashforward - Sun is in labour, calling out for Jin, while Jin tries to get a present. Jin's side of the storyline provides some mild comic relief but they don't really get interesting until Jin mentions exactly how long he's been married. The mixture of flashback and flashforward feels a little gimmicky and doesn't pay off the theme that had been running through the episode. It turns out Jin is dead in the future, apparently, and Sun's baby is named Ji Yeon because that was his choice. None of this sentiment articularly hits the spot, but it also manages to ruin anything in the present, because we now know that Jin is apparently going to die.
     This episode was an attempt to juggle up the componants of a well-tread formula, but at its heart it remains a stereotypical Jin and Sun episode. I really don't think the couple have any dramatic potential anymore, and quite frankly they won't get anywhere close until the end of the series, when they both die horribly. The episode's sole saving grace was the Freighter storyline, which managed to advance the plot and throw in another bundle of intrigue about the series as a whole.

Thanks.