Take2Guide To Lost - Published Today!

As I mentioned last month, today marks the publishing of the Take2Guide to Lost, the ultimate guide to the brilliant show that helped to define television in the noughties. It contains over 400 articles from over 50 authors, including yours truly, and has overviews, discussions on themes and characters, as well as individual episode recaps.

If you have any interest in Lost at all, I cannot recommend this book more.

Buy the book here. Sales will help an ailing student writer. :D

Thanks.

Take2Guide to Lost!

Cover from Take2Publishing

Back in October, I was approached by the wonderful John Pruzanski to have some of the Lost articles on this blog published in an e-book. That book, the Take2Guide to Lost, is due to be published online on September 18th 2015, and will include 45 of my articles as well as hundreds of other pieces from over 50 bloggers and writers.

If you're interested, then bookmark this link and buy it when it becomes avaliable. Each sale goes to helping a poor student blogger. :D

Thanks.

Review: Lost 3.22/23: Through The Looking Glass

And a thousand memes were born...
From gif-central

Lost - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three - Through The Looking Glass
Written 23/3/14

We're here, then. My last Lost review. And, for the not the first time in these four or so years of reviewing the show, I'm a little lost for words on how to begin. It doesn't feel right to go about this episode within my usual format of blabbering on in metaphors for five minutes, but that's really all I know how to do. So - what's so great about Through The Looking Glass? As a normal finale it's somewhat more subdued than the previous two seasons, probably down to the trend I mentioned last week where the end of this season focussed more on the overall mytharc than it did on big climactic plot points. Alongside a fairly badass set of Island events which include the end of the war with The Others, the reunion of Danielle and Alex Rousseau and a chance of some of our survivors getting home at last, we also have something special - the first Flash-forward, which leads to one of the best cliffhangers in the entire show.

Lost's most iconic character death.
From Wikia

     Carrying straight on from the previous episode, and a confident Charlie gets tied up by the Others that operate the Looking Glass, Greta and Bonnie. The plan to blow up the Others at the beach camp almost goes off without a hitch - Jin misses his bundle of dynamite, culminating in Tom Friendly capturing the three shooters. On the way to the Radio Tower, Sawyer, Juliet and Hurley decide to head back to see what happened, not having seen the third explosion from afar. As Mikhail and Desmond both arrive at the Looking Glass, Jack's team meets Ben and Alex, and Ben convinces Jack that the three shooters are dead. However, Hurley comes to the rescue of the three using the DHARMA van, and Sawyer takes his revenge on Tom by shooting him in the chest. Mikhail turns on the two women in the Looking Glass and Desmond takes him by surprise, allowing Charlie to use a hint from Bonnie to turn off the jamming signal. Mikhail is still alive, however, and detonates a grenade outside the window, leading Charlie to save Desmond by shutting himself in. In his last, hand-written message, Charlie imparts the fact that Naomi's crew is "Not Penny's Boat." Jack is able to contact the Freighter, but Locke has returned from his injury and throws a knife in Naomi's back.
     Charlie's death, while very poignant and well-shot, is conflicting for me. I hate to be that guy, but, I do study Physics. And the simple fact is that Charlie did not need to die - and I don't mean that in a whiny, "Why did he have to die!?!" way, I mean that the show makes it look like an act of pure stupidity on Charlie's part. In the show, the room that Charlie's in has its window blown open, causing water to rush in. In order to prevent the station from flooding, Charlie shuts the door behind him. Now. Had Charlie not shut the door, both he and Desmond would have had ample time to jump back into the moonpool and escape with their lives. Not just because the Looking Glass is pretty big, but also because the water wouldn't rise beyond the top of the window, so Charlie and Desmond would have all the air they could ever ask for. The same is true for Charlie in his locked room - he would have found himself standing neck-deep in water, certainly, but there'd be no drowning happening.

Charlie shouldn't die. (Or at least according to Physics.)

      Here's where I'd discuss the plot of the flashforward, but that's not important because wow, it's a god-damn flashforward. I commented a bit on this change in dynamic during my first few reviews of Season Four, but since that was in 2011 I should really talk about it again. With the Writers' Guild of America Strike of 2008 (the same one that crippled Heroes' second season) on the horizon, introducing flash-forwards was a way to keep up the interest for the show over the longer break and to provide some change to the format that had stood the show true for three seasons. I liked it at the time, but now I'm not so fond - one of the fun parts of the flashbacks was that every episode added a new element to someone's personality, because you knew more about their history and could relate their past experiences to those in the present. Flashforwards reverse this dynamic, but that often means that our flashforwarding Losties are just happening to remember things that are happening in our present. If that makes any sense.
     Ultimately the main core of the episode wasn't much to wax lyrical about. It was cathartic to see the end of the Survivors Versus The Others storyline, even as the lines between them began to blur. Everything that needed to happen in our characters arcs happened, and there was a sense of closure which was only slightly tickled by that epic cliffhanger which revealed that actually, some of them do get off the Island. And that for some reason, Jack wants to go back. It's a brilliant end to a brilliant swansong to the era of long-ass seasons and normal flashbacks and human characters and stuff. It's nearly all of the reasons why I love Lost. Why I still love Lost, after all my whining. And I'm gonna miss talking about it.

Thanks.

Review: Lost 3.21: Greatest Hits

Charlies writes his list of Greatest Hits. From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Twenty-One - Greatest Hits
Written 22/3/14

Charlie Pace - a character whose three season journey went from brilliant to disappointing and then back to okayish with a side of "that's not how you say Aaron, omg shut up". As a Manc myself, it's fantastic to see somewhere other than London actually mentioned in the rest of the world, and especially in a character who began life as complex and difficult as Charlie. The inevitability of his death and the show's constant signposting of it makes him a very interesting exception to the usual rules of TV - but that by no means diminishes the quiet poignancy that his acceptance of his death brings to this last pre-finale episode.
      There's a sense of pre-finale fever as Jack reveals his plan to defeat The Others - by planting dynamite (courtesy of a returned Danielle Rousseau) in marked tents, the Survivors can blow The Others to kingdom come without them even knowing. Sayid reveals that Naomi's phone signal is being blocked; Juliet chirps in with the fact that all signals to and from the Island are blocked by an underwater station called The Looking Glass. Desmond has revealed to Charlie that Claire and Aaron will be rescued - but only if Charlie descends to The Looking Glass and disables the blocking frequency. Charlie thus says his goodbyes and writes a list of the five greatest moments in his life - his Greatest Hits - for Desmond to give to Claire once he is gone. Karl arrives, revealing that Ben has brought the plan forward by a day, thus meaning that three things must happen at once - the spoiling of The Others' raid, a trek to the Island's radio tower and Charlie's underwater adventure. Charlie reaches The Looking Glass, but once there he is held at gunpoint by an Other.
      In previous reviews near the end of a season I've oft talked about episodes whose sole purpose is to shift the characters into the right positions for the season finale, and while they might have had quite a while to do this, the end of Season Three has been so full of character devleopment and mytharc stroking that we're only just getting to it. Considering the fact that we're only an episode or two away from where I started Lost, it's strange to think about how little the atmosphere of the show is to that - the Writers' Guild of America Strike really did a number on the show post-Season Three, and I'll be talking about that more in my overview of the whole show

Charlie's death, while poignant, is kinda stupid. But I'll save
that for next week, eh? From Wikia

      This week's flashbacks were split up into five unrelated segments, charting the Greatest Hits on Charlie's list. On a rainy Clitheroe road, Charlie hears his band's one-hit-wonder "You All Everybody" on the radio for the first time. At Butlins, a young Charlie learns to swim with his Irish dad. Charlie's brother Liam gives him his family heirloom "DS" ring. Outside Covent Garden, Charlie saves a woman (Sayid's belle Nadia making her once-a-season appearance) from being attacked, and she calls him a hero. Finally, #1 on Charlie's list, is the moment when Charlie and Claire first meet, and he reassures her that rescue is on the way. I always get a little weary when the show tries to use Hawaiian locations for English locales, especially as it's very rarely accurate at all, but this style of flashback meant that such discrepancies were minimal and their distribution throughout the episode made them quite touching as counterpoints to Charlie's decision.
     Like Charlie, and myself, this episode felt very much like it was getting ready for the end. There was so much manoeuvring going on with the characters, elaborating on plotlines which for the past few weeks have been mere one-scene hints. But through all that busybodying, there was still room to feel something for a character whose storyline has been at times both brilliantly inspired and completely misguided. And, seeing how much he was loved by the fanbase, this was a stroke of absolute genius. Greatest Hits is an episode whose strange kind of contention in sadness is something that makes it very, very worthy of its own title.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: My last Lost review. Really, this time. We see the final showdown between the Survivors and The Others before the impending Writer's Guild of America strike looms and we're presented with Lost's most wtf cliffhanger ever - we go Through The Looking Glass.

Review: Lost 3.20: The Man Behind The Curtain

Ickle Ben meets Horace Goodspeed in 1972.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Twenty - The Man Behind The Curtain
Written 21/3/14

Benjamin Linus has, until this point in the series, been more or less portrayed as an all-knowing entity whose power of manipulation over the Islanders reaches near superhuman levels. Every time it's appeared that he was ignorant of something, it turns out that he's factored it into his plan. He lies, he bluffs - everything he does is part of his grand plan to maintain power and control over those around him; a common theme this season. This, Ben's first centric episode, shatters that illusion almost entirely. Not only do we see the origins of this disturbed little man as a young member of the DHARMA initiative (lots of Season Five cameos here :D), but we see John Locke so thoroughly tear him apart that he loses all sense of calm. It is a tour-de-force for Michael Emerson and one of this season's most powerful episodes.
      Locke returns to The Others' camp with his dad's body and demands to see Jacob, the man whom the Others revere as a leader. A returning Mikhail gives Ben time to make excuses, but Locke is not having any of his bullshit - he beats Mikhail to a pulp to make that very point. Ben takes Locke out into the jungle, and along the way Locke questions his knowledge about the Island - he thinks that he's a fraud. A visit to a mysterious cabin in the jungle sees Ben initially appear as a complete actor - but then there's a voice in the cabin that only Locke can hear. Ben briefly explains his DHARMA initiative origins as he takes Locke to the mass-grave of victims from The Others' purge of the DHARMA society and shoots him in the side, explaining that "Jacob" has never spoken to him. In the Survivors' camp, Jack reveals that he knows about Juliet's secret mission and that together they have orchestrated a plan to prevent them from taking the pregnant women.
       Through flashbacks, we see Ben's history, as well as the fact that Richard Alpert doesn't age. His mother died in childbirth in a small forest outside Portland, Oregon, and his father has blamed him for his mother's death ever since. A chance encounter with DHARMA high-up Horace Goodspeed on that fateful day brings Ben and his father Roger (whose body Hurley found in Tricia Tanaka Is Dead) to the Island. As a child, Ben is friends with a young girl named Annie, and after a particularly depressing birthday he runs out into the jungle and, following an apparition of his dead mother, he runs into Richard Alpert and asks to join The Others. Twenty years later in 1992, and an adult Ben orchestrates The Purge, poisoning the DHARMA initiative using toxic gas, with only those in The Swan left alive.

Richard looks exactly the same in 1972 as in 2004.
From Wikia

     The deconstruction of Ben as a character begins in the flashbacks, certainly. Sterling Beaumon, who would come back to play Ben again in Season Five, presents a timid yet curious little boy driven to frustration by his father's abuse. His mother's death in childbirth provides a root for his drive to prevent the Island's pregnant women from dying. But the fact that they are dying exposes something crucial about Ben's character - he thinks he's the chosen one, and The Others did for a while, but he's wrong on all counts. The visions he sees are probably manipulations by The Monster, especially as once he becomes leader of The Others, nothing but misfortune befalls him. He's shot in the stomach, Annie has to leave, pregnant women start dying (his exact phobia), and despite the fact that the Island heals everyone of all its illnesses, Ben develops cancer.
      This development of Ben as an even more tragic dark counterpart to Locke and his journey is exposed a lot more given information in the fifth and sixth seasons. We find out that the being who occupies Jacob's Cabin is not the very real Jacob, but is in fact his nemesis, The Monster. (Aka The Man In Black.) In Season Five, Ben reveals something that confirms all of my suspicions during this episode - Ben's actions in the Cabin (talking to an empty chair and claiming it to be Jacob) are a complete act. The brilliance of Michael Emerson's performance in this episode is the way that he manages the performance in such a way that it can be interpreted in either way - in hindsight it's obvious that he's really desperate during that scene, but without that hindsight there is a fantastic level of ambiguity and that provides the scene's crucial tension.

This'd be funny if it didn't remind me of this.
From Wikia

     Ben-centric episodes are typically fantastic, and this first outing is the most successful. Even though I wouldn't say that his character is the most developed of our characters, or even my particular favourite, Emerson's performance is one of such subtlety and grace that it's hard to ignore the presence he holds onscreen. And this episode plays into his hands in a number of ways, taking the Ben we know and more explicitly outlining the fact that contrary to previous appearances, he is vulnerable. He's not quite yet on the path to being the show's Dark Horse character, but he is a fantastic villain and more than worthy of this tremendous episode.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Charlie must decide whether to follow one of Desmond's prophecies as he contemplates his Greatest Hits.

Review: Lost 3.19: The Brig

Obscure character connections that make good sense.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Nineteen - The Brig
Written 20/3/13

Locke's third centric this season, the last Locke centric I have left to cover, is quite understated for a story which both takes his current plotline into new territory and settles a score as old as the show itself for him and Sawyer. In that way it was quite wonderfully dark, as Locke first considered whether he should exact revenge on his evil, evil father, and then seeing him embrace his "destiny" by manipulating someone else to do it for him, in a set of scenes which were eerily similar to those in the Sixth Season. There are also hints of the season's finale creeping up upon us, with secret hidden plans and a confrontation between the survivors and The Others which is gonna be spectacular.
     We discover through flashback the events since Locke met his dad in The Man From Tallahassee - they were moved to a old Island monument, where Ben told Locke that he had to kill his father to achieve a special status amongst The Others, whom Locke now considers his people. When Ben, knowing Locke's attachment, uses it to show Locke up in front of his people, Richard Alpert gives Locke the file of one James Ford and suggests that Locke take a look. In the present, and Locke guides Sawyer away from camp with the proviso that he's captured Ben and that he wants Sawyer to kill him. When they reach the hiding place, the brig of the Black Rock, Sawyer instead finds Anthony Cooper, who reveals while blabbering that he was the conman who led to his parents' deaths. After Cooper tears up his special letter, Sawyer kills him there and then. Back at camp, and word goes round about Naomi - except to Jack, who is informed at the end of the episode by Kate, and then proceeds to reveal that he and Juliet have something up their sleeve for the next few days anyway...
     Dropping the spoiler bombshell here for a second (skip to the next paragraph, you strange people who haven't seen Season Six), the way that Locke and Sawyer interact in this episode is very, very reminiscent of the interaction between Sawyer and The Man In Black, also played by Locke actor Terry O'Quinn. Locke here has adopted Ben's own strategy - anything he doesn't want to do himself, he manipulates into doing himself, While it's fairly cack-handed (Sawyer is not the hardest man to fool, at least at this point in the show), it still shows a devious ingenuity which certainly did not exist before Island-times. He still can't bring himself to kill his father - the man who so many years of his life were spent obsessing over - but that doesn't mean Locke doesn't want him dead.

There are so many lines in this episode which become
brilliantly ironic in the last two seasons that I'm not sure
if it wasn't completely intentional. From Wikia

      While it was a Locke episode, the lack of an off-Island story meant that we got a lot of time to look at Sawyer too - this is sorta his episode as well, especially as him getting to face the man who killed his parents is something of a climactic step along his character development. And I gotta give the writers credit - it didn't feel as contrived as I thought it would that it just so happens that Locke's dad is the original Sawyer. Kevin Tighe's Anthony Cooper is a deliciously evil shit-eating villain, insults and indignities oozing out of his character like an oil slick. He's vastly, incredibly hateable as a villain, and yet all the same he is in no way cartoonish - people like Cooper really exist, and that's what makes him so brilliant.
      While not as mind-blowing as next week's Ben-centric episode, The Brig had a lot going on beneath the skin in terms of Locke's development - his capacity to manipulate others. I mentioned a few weeks ago how a lot of the character arcs in this season have been about attempting to take control of one's life and one's circumstances, and I think it's particularly funny that on Lost this means that Locke effectively becomes, as Sawyer has, the man he despises. The fact that Sawyer and Locke are more similar than previously thought it not only genius, but it's also a pointer towards the friendship they'd develop across Seasons Four and Five. And Anthony Cooper's dead. That's enough to make anyone happy.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We see how Ben became the man he is today. Richard Alpert hasn't aged since 1973? Who's Annie? And if not Jacob, who is the man living in his cabin? All these questions and more to be asked in The Man Behind The Curtain.

Review: Lost 3.18: D.O.C

The first appearance of Ji Yeon Kwon. (Awww.)
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Eighteen - D.O.C
Written 19/3/14

I was musing to myself earlier about some obscure Lost trivia - this episode is the last one to feature flashes which are entirely in a language other than English. It was then I stumbled upon a rather big piece of trivia - this is the last normal off-Island flashback episode in Lost's entire run. No more looking into the pasts of our survivors, no more tracing their steps from mediocrity through calamity and onto the fateful flight which brought them to us. And it's funny to me that this last swansong for the format of the first three seasons comes as a Sun/Jin episode - their story was always a tad more interesting in flashback than it was in present, even if it followed a lot of clichés along the way.
     Trying to help an injured Naomi, Desmond's band ran into Mikhail, who survived his apparent death in Par Avion and is quick to offer his experience as a Soviet field medic to help heal Naomi's punctured lung. He helps them and gets away, but not before Jin stops him from stealing Naomi's satellite phone. Naomi, once sufficiently recovered, reveals to Hurley that as far as the outside world is concerned, Flight 815 has been found and all the passengers are dead. Meanwhile, Sun is ruffled by Jack's extra concern, and talking to Juliet reveals why. Juliet offers to help Sun, and in the dead of night she takes her to The Staff for an ultrasound. Despite her fears, the time of gestation points to Jin as the father and not Sun's pre-Island lover Jae Lee - but all the same, the baby's conception on the Island means that Sun has two months left to live unless she leaves its shores.
      Our flashback (our last segmented off-Island flashback ever) took us, as usual, to Seoul, where Jin and Sun are newlyweds moving into their first apartment. A woman comes up to Sun and blackmails her, saying that if she doesn't receive $100,000 by a set date, then she will reveal to the world that Jin's mother was a prostitute. She speaks to Jin's fisherman papa and he reveals that it's the truth, and this drives her to request the money from her rich Mafioso dad. He agrees for her sake, but on one condition - Jin has to work as one of his thugs. (As we saw in ...In Translation.)

South Korean Army Training > USSR Army Training
From Wikia

      Yet again, this week gave some more time for Juliet to develop, but unlike in Left Behind, she didn't outshine Yunjin Kim's by now brilliantly nuanced performance as Sun. It's quite striking how much her character has come on - in the first season, I feel now as though there was a certain sense of stereotyping -  the quiet, submissive asian woman. Now Sun is far more three-dimensional - moral enough to stand against her father's corruption, not naiive enough to ignore the influence it gives her, and deeply loving towards a husband whom she, given in her place in society, wouldn't be expected to look at twice. This episode is an examination of how much Sun's character has changed - both on the way to her subservient state, and far, far away from it.
      As much as I'd love to stay and chat, this is still a Sun/Jin episode, and despite the fact that the Naomi storyline which is gonna be so crucial in about a month rattled along nicely, I don't have that much to say about the main meat of the episode that I haven't said before - Sun has developed well, Juliet is both morally gray and yet infinitely connectable, Kate was in this episode apparently at some point. I've no disrespect for D.O.C at all, I'm really loving the momentum this season has even during this downtime, but in the next few weeks we've got much bigger fish to fry, and it's gonna be amazing.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: So, er... what happened with Locke meeting his dad? That was five weeks ago and we got no resolution. Oh, we're having on-island flashbacks? Oh goodie. :D It's time we saw Locke head to The Brig.

Review: Lost 3.17: Catch-22

Este episódio foi cheio de de viagem
no tempo momentos de diversão.
De Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Seventeen - Catch-22
Written between 16th and 18th March 2014

Lost is a big fan of writing entire episodes around literary allusions, and this week's eponymous plot-grab comes from a book by Joseph Heller in which there arises a no-win situation in which there are two given choices, both of which will lead to unpleasant consequences. As well as making English Majors wet themselves, this episode followed the trend of Desmond-centrics, providing us with some exciting sci-fi conundrums to do with time-travel, predestination and, funnily enough, whether Superman could beat The Flash in a foot-race. (He can't, by the way.)
      Desmond receives a new flash - He, Charlie, Hurley and Jin are walking through the jungle, looking for a parachuter who has bailed out of a helicopter. Charlie accidentally steps on one of Rousseau's traps, and is killed. Hoping that the parachuter in his vision is his long-lost lover Penny Widmore, Desmond gathers the four of them together in order to follow the events of his vision exactly, afraid that if he doesn't follow it (and if he doesn't let Charlie die) that he will never see Penny again. When it comes down to it, he saves Charlie, who isn't too happy to hear about the real contents of the flash. The parachuter comes down, and has a satellite phone to hand, but it isn't Penny - it's a Manc woman named Naomi. Elsewhere, and there is some minor Love Rectangle shenanigans. In Desmond's flashback, we see him as a Monk, having left his previous girlfriend in a sudden moment of fear. He is forced to leave the Monastry after a night of drunkenness, yet on the way out he meets a beautiful English girl named Penny.
     The appearance of Naomi means that we're getting frighteningly close to the endgame of these reviews, as she was someone I mentioned quite a bit (but didn't see very much of) in Season Four. Her appearance does however faciliate the episode's interesting main-island subplot, which is more about the morality of acting of pre-destination than anything else. This is the first flash where Desmond had to explicitly cause what he was seeing to happen, and that leads to the inevitable question - given that we can assume that Charlie is gonna die anyway through Flashes Before Your Eyes' course-correction, is it wrong to let him die if it leads to the rescue of everyone else? This question will get examined in greater detail in a few episodes' time, but it raises a little nitpick about this entire plotline - the idea that Desmond's flashes only pertain to Charlie's death. It all seems a little too specific to fit into the mythos. A bit convenient.

I'd try to insert another falling pun, but I've used them twice
already this season so I'll leave it. From Wikia

     The love rectangle segments, in which Kate angrily sleeps with Sawyer as a means of getting back at Jack for hanging around with new belle Juliet, were mildly entertaining but rather distractingly tangential to the main plot. I don't need to really elaborate on my feelings about the Love Rectangle - especially as we're six episodes from the end of these reviews and there are much more fun things to talk about. If anything it damaged Kate's character - the pettiness with which she sorta jumped on Sawyer as a direct act of jealousy against Jack, when really by this stage they've both betrayed each other enough times to not warrant this level of emotional control. Maybe I just don't understand relationships or something, I don't know.
      Catch-22 was an interesting use of Desmond's time-travel, which worked in a significant move forward for his storyline while simultaneously introducing us to a development in the main plot which, as they're currently bogged down in the laziest kind of romantic writing, our "main" characters aren't able to provide. It wasn't the perfectly orchestrated Lost gold that typifies this half of the season, but all the same it was an adequate distraction. Next week we get to see The Staff again and Juliet's cover gets blown. So that's fun.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We find out who Sun's babypapa is and Juliet helps out in D.O.C.

Review: Lost 3.16: One Of Us

Ben's smelt something and Juliet's not happy about it.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Sixteen - One of Us
Written 14/3/14 (Happy Pi Day!)

Juliet is a very interesting character. It sounds bland when I put it bluntly like that, but it's nonetheless true in a way which marks her out almost immediately. Out of all the new introductions to the show, Elizabeth Mitchell's portrayl won we over in the least amount of time, and within the space of half a season, her episodes have become events as big as Locke episode or, as would later happen, a Ben episode. And that's because Elizabeth Mitchell and the writing team imbue Juliet's character with so many varying layers that you simultaneously sympathise with her and have no idea what she's really feeling. We don't trust Juliet... but we want to. And that's a distinction worth making.
     This week's flashbacks followed on from those in Not In Portland and followed until the present day, watching as Juliet turns slowly from the timid woman who was browbeaten by her ex-husband into the hard woman we see on the island. She is brought to The Island and Ben refuses to let her go, even as she discovers the hard way why they needed her - women who conceive on the Island always die of pregnancy complications if not taken off the Island. It is explained how Claire was a test case to prove their theory, and how Ethan took matters into his own hands. Ben manipulated Juliet by telling her that her sister had cancer, and then claiming that if Juliet stayed, then Jacob would heal her. This is then counteracted when, the day before the crash of Oceanic 815, Ben's tumour is discovered - the stories about healing cancer are a lie. We cut to just before The Others' leave The Baracks, and discover that Juliet's actions since Left Behind have all been part of one of Ben's masterplans.
      The Others' manipulative nature all seems to come from Ben (ignoring Jacob and all that Season Six crap, for those in the know), and we see throughout Juliet's flashbacks just how she is manipulated to follow his every whim - although clearly it's not as perfect as they'd like. Through this manipulation, through the despair and anguish it brings to her, she develops a rage and desperation which is clear throughout this episode. Part of the appeal of her character comes from a similar to Ben - you never really have any idea of what she's going to do or why, but the difference is that Ben is overall more malicious and petty in his true intentions, wheras Juliet has been driven to this personality by his destructive manipulation.

The camp watches the "ocean waves" relaxation
video on loop. From Wikia

     On-island, and Juliet was marched back to the beach camp with Sayid, Kate and Jack. She's immediately distrusted by everyone and the dog, and it soon happens that Claire falls dreadfully ill. Juliet immediately claims responsibility, and goes to fetch medecine, leading to a confrontation where Sayid and Sawyer attempt to interogate her and she shuts them down due to her knowledge of both of their murderous and torturous acts off-island. Under Jack's protections, she gives the medecine to Claire, and earns the slight respect of the group. Of course, now we cut back to that flashback we mentioned - this scenario was set up a while ago, and nearly all of Juliet's heartfelt pleading was complete porkies.
      I'm very sorry if I've waffled at all today; I'm quite tired and out of it and all sorts of other things. It's strange to me that I am now only six reviews away from finishing this project, one I started four years ago in the Summer of 2010. My bafflement is helped slightly by this episode's quality, while by now I'm sure I've waffled on about with enough self-repeating procrastination that you stopped reading after the first paragraph. So, that considered, I'm off to go and watch the next episode. Have fun.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Desmond finds himself in a Catch-22.

Review: Lost 3.15: Left Behind

Lost - Season Three, Episode Fifteen - Left Behind
Written between 11th and 12th March 2014

In Lost's history, there have been episodes which tied together a central, specific theme and applied it a wide range of characters, with varying levels of applicability and success. This week, however, it's all spot on. The character beats are quite subdued on the whole, but the roundness of the episode's theme of being afraid of abandonment is quite profound, especially when none of it seems particularly contrived. It was a decent character focus for both Juliet and Kate, as well as developing Sawyer in both of the stories, thanks to a recurring guest star that connects some of this season's plotlines together quite well.

"eyefucking ensues" From Wikia

      Locke tells Kate that he and The Others are abandoning the Baracks - two minutes later, and Kate finds herself in the jungle, handcuffed to Juliet. Neither of them happy about the situation, they work their way back to The Baracks, encountering The Monster on the way. Juliet makes several revelations - that Jack knows about Kate and Sawyer doing the do, and that the only reason the two were handcuffed together was so that Juliet didn't have to feel alone. They meet up with Jack and Sayid, and together they head back towards camp. At the beach camp, Hurley cons Sawyer into being nice to everyone by convincing him that the other survivors will banish him if he doesn't improve.
     Juliet's character and how much it's compared to Kate in this episode still continues to astound me in how detailed each and every scene is. Juliet is, like most good characters, a study in contradiction - tough, trained and ruthless but at the same time desperate and emotionally vulnerable. She seems to quietly pride herself on how she knows more about Jack than Kate does - even though we know that she gained her information for the wrong reasons. I think the point is supposed to be that she knows this as well - her Love Rectangle boasting towards Kate comes as her most recent attempt to, like Locke before her, take control in her life. Most importantly for me, I think the fact that I left this Kate-centric episode feeling more for Juliet's situation is very, very telling.
     In Kate's flashback, we saw her meet Cassidy - Sawyer's victim and later babymama, just before she turned him into the feds to provide his imprisonment in Every Man For Himself. Kate, who's a good year or so into her life on the run, helps her out when a con starts to go wrong, and in return Cassidy agrees to help her with her mission - to get close enough to her mother Diane to ask why she turned her into the cops. After posing as Kate to see the strength of Marshall Mars' surveillance, Cassidy comes up a with a plan, allowing Kate to sneak into the diner where her mother works and ask her why she handed her in. Her mother replies that you love who you love, yada yada, and Kate barely makes it out. She thanks Cassidy for her help, and tells her to hand over the scumbag who conned her. (Sawyer, in this case.)

Juliet casually stares down The Monster. Because
she's just that badass. From Wikia

     Kate's mother and the frustration Kate feels over the hold her now deceased father still holds on her was hard to watch, especially given that the confusion she feels is very apparent. I like the fact that what she did has very mixed moral implications - there's no denying that Wayne was a scumbag, and the world really is a better place with him dead. I think the more important thing to note is the kind of society that would force two women in an abusive relationship (he beat his wife and felt up Kate, who last season we discovered was his biological daughter) to have to resort to murder in order to feel safe. While my first instinct would be to complain about how ungrateful Diane is being to her daughter (she isn't being beaten any more, and she's filthy stinking rich from Wayne's life insurance), I recognise that there are aspects of abusive relationships that this show is trying to cover, and doing so with some mild sensitivity.
      If I recall correctly, then this is the last Kate episode I will ever have to write about. Which, frighteningly, means I'm seven reviews away from finishing my run-through of Lost alltogether. I feel like I should have been making grand, sweeping statements - more than I do usually, anyway. It's hard to focus on the long-term milestones in this project when the individual episodes, even when they're a bit off, are so captivating in their themes and performances. This episode was made by Juliet and Cassidy, the way that they interacted with Kate, and by the way that all of the interlinked characters were facing the same problem in very different ways. Kate chose cunning, Cassidy imitation, Sawyer repention, Juliet deception. It was a fascinating study of our characters - and that's usually a sign that Lost is doing something right.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Another step in Juliet's story comes alive as we wonder if she's One of Us.

Review: Lost 3.14: Exposé

Nikki and Paolo are retconned into the first two seasons.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Fourteen - Exposé
Written 10/3/14

Nikki and Paolo are some of the most hated characters in Lost history - this being the show that produced such asswipes as Martin Keamy, Zoe, Danny Pickett and Jack Shepherd. (I'm only teasing, Jack fans.) Their sudden appearance in the show at the start of this season came out of nowhere and for no reason, and the fact that their personalities weren't that likeable anyway didn't help matters. After the intial reviews of the season pointed out that Nikki and Paolo were more or less useless, the writers decided to devote this episode to putting their existence to bed, developing a simple centric story into a thrillride which uses and abuses Lost's format, history and idiosyncracies. I think it's wonderful.
     Nikki strolls out of the jungle and collapses in front of Hurley and Sawyer. As they attempt to find out what happened to her and the similarly afflicted Paolo, we revisit their time before and on the island through flashbacks. The two were lovers who conned a rich TV producer for $8 million worth in diamonds, before their return flight to Los Angeles turned out to be Oceanic 815. The episode digitally edits Nikki and Paolo into a number of events from the first two seasons, as well as retconning certain discoveries such as the Pearl Station and the Beechcraft to be theirs. Eventually Nikki finds out that lover Paolo has been hiding the diamonds from her to prevent her from leaving him, resulting in her using a spider to paralyse him. Before she can gloat, the spider paralyses her too, and to the survivors they both appear dead. Just before their funeral, in which they're buried alive, both Charlie and Sawyer own up to Sun about kidnapping her last season.
     The number of meta references to fan speculation and questions is quite nice throughout, with the script being entirely aware of the fandom's opinion of the characters, and milking it for all it's worth. As much as I don't like their characterisations, I think the fact that they've gained fairly thorough character development over the course of 45 minutes is a mean feat, as well as what is something of a successful retcon which adds to the story instead of taking away from it. (With the exception of the Pearl discovery, which raises a bunch of awkard continuity questions that I won't get into.) What I liked the most was that the episode made it clear from the outset what the tone was going to be, with a showing of Nikki's cheesy TV show Exposé - and what follows matches up to it well, with a mutlitude of cameos from dead characters all thrown in as something of a celebration of Lost's journey up to this point.

Charlie confesses to Sun. From Wikia

     I also liked the fact that even though it retconned a fair amount, it also progressed and beefed up a number of other storylines which needed some due attention. Seeing Charlie apologise to Sun felt in a way like the writers apologising to the audience for how they wrote his character in the middle of Season Two, and I'm glad that those two characters will have to deal with the consequences of those actions in a realistic way. We also got a chance to snoop in on Juliet and Ben as they planned their end-of-Season-Two masterplan, which added some nice flavour to a storyline which will continue to develop in Juliet's brilliant centric episode in two weeks.
     Exposé was great fun. Yeah, it did a lot of things that I've criticised heavily in other shows, but the tone of the show was so tongue in cheek and making such an effort to celebrate Lost's little foibles that I can't really damn it for any of the stupid things that happened. If Nikki and Paolo were one of the show's first big mistakes, then it's really telling that the writers not only fixed this mistake at the first opportunity, but that they did so with such grace and such gusto. If I can criticise this episode for anything in particular, it's that all those shots of earlier seasons made me want to go back to Season One and rewatch it again. But that would make this run-through even longer than it already is, and there are even better episodes to come.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The small band of Kate/Juliet shippers get their golden hour when the two of them are Left Behind.

Review: Lost 3.13: The Man From Tallahassee

"How do you get your power in this place?"
From f**kyeahlost

Lost - Season Three, Episode Thirteen - The Man From Tallahassee
Written 10/3/14

This season intensified a lot sooner than I thought it would. This is of course a Locke episode, the first of which after the Henry Gale arc to really pair together Ben and Locke - which by all accounts is a fantastic move. Emerson and O'Quinn are fantastic actors, and episodes like this which play off of their various neuroses are just endlessly entertaining. Plus, we also get to see the circumstances of Locke's off-island paralysis, because the previous Locke episode just wasn't depressing enough for everyone involved and we need to make Terry O'Quinn cry.
     Deciding that the best approach is to ask Jack what the hell he's doing working with The Others, Locke's band (minus Danielle Rousseau, who takes her leave) enters the Baracks.While Kate and Sayid go straight to Jack's and get caught, Locke holds a recovering Ben at gunpoint. Ben reveals that Jack and Juliet are due to leave on the submarine that takes them to and from the Island - and he knows what Locke wants to do, which is blow the submarine up with the C4 he recovered from The Flame two episodes ago. Locke goes ahead with his plan, even as Jack and Juliet approach his position, and he earns both their anger when the Submarine - and any hope of leaving the Island by themselves - is destroyed. Later, Ben reveals to Locke that this was exactly the result he wanted, and he shows Locke a present - his father, somehow brought to The Island.
      In the past, we see Locke as a depressed loner. He is approached by a man named Peter Talbot (Suits' Patrick J. Adams) who asks why Locke gave a kidney to his mother's golddigging new suitor - Locke's father, Anthony Cooper. Locke confronts Cooper on his activities - he's conning Mama Talbot, and John isn't happy about it. He demands that Cooper break off the relationship and leave town. Later, after the police arrive to tell Locke that Peter Talbot has been mysteriously killed, he goes to confront his father. In a moment of distraction, Cooper pushes Locke out of an 8-story window, and he falls to the ground, now paralysed from the waist down.

Locke falls for another one of his father's cons.
(I'll get my coat...) From Wikia

     Michael Emerson's Ben slowly loses some of his power throughout the series, but any lapse here is purely an illusion - even while weak and recovering from back surgery, Ben is a master manipulator who turns sarcasm and small-talk into psychological molding. He even manages to rationalise Locke's desire to blow up the Submarine - with that method of leaving gone, he can no longer lose the gift of motion that The Island has given him, and his evil papa will never find him. (Or so he thinks, of course.) Locke replies in kind with the kind of badass stuff that his character will do for the next few seasons - leading to some brilliant, quotable snarking in reply.
      The cackling villainy of Anthony Cooper, something we're familiar with, makes a sharp contrast to very different yet equally as tricky Ben, and the fact that Locke is facing two very different villains in very different states of power makes this episode a very interesting one. It wasn't just the standard, "bad things happen to John Locke" - this is a John Locke that's long since accepted that, and who is finally trying to take back some power in his life. But in both stories, he's manipulated - subtley by Ben, brutally by his father. It's a similar idea to the theme which runs through all of Locke's centric episodes - except here it's framed by an exciting mythos, a bitchin' new set and a string of conversations which have to be heard to be believed.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We're back to Season Three shittiness with Nikki and Paolo's story, Exposé.

Review: Lost 3.12: Par Avion

"To whom it may concern: We are survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. We have survived on this island for 80 days. We were six hours into the flight when the pilot said we were off course and turned back toward Fiji. We hit turbulence and crashed. We've been waiting here all this time--waiting for rescue that has not come. We do not know where we are. We only know you have not found us. We've done our best to live on this island. Some of us have come to accept we may never leave it. Not all of us have survived since the crash. But there is new life, too, and with it, there is hope. We are alive. Please don't give up on us.

I don't know why Claire was a goth. Lazy writer speak for
"rebellious and moody"? From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Twelve - Par Avion
Written 9/3/14

Sixty-one episodes since the pilot and we're officially at Lost's half-way mark, even if we've covered about 91% of the show to get here. Odd, that. As is this episode, which takes a look at Claire and her past with Jack's dad Christian, presented alongside a juicy continuation of last week's plot in order to give us something actually interesting to think about. For those not versed in gratuitous French, Par Avion is the French term for being delivered "by way of air," which is either a genius title exploiting the series' premise or a pretentious piece of foreign language snobbery. You decide, Britain.
     Dans l'island, Desmond tries to protect Charlie from yet another terrible death, a result of Claire's desire to catch a seagull and exploit its migratory nature by pinning a message to one of its legs.She gets very confused and frustrated as Charlie refuses to have anything to do with her attempt, and she's noticed that he and Desmond keep having secretive little chats. After shouting at Desmond for once again foiling her attempt, he goes in himself and catches a bird, explaining everything to her. A good few kilometres north, and Locke's merry band follow the Flame's map towards The Baracks. They encounter a set of pylons, which Locke tests by throwing Mikhail into, leading to his apparrent death. They scale the pylons, but once they arrive at the Barracks, they find Jack casually playing football with Tom Friendly.
     In Claire's flashbacks, we discover that she crashes her mother's car, leaving her in a coma. This leads to the arrival of Christian Shepherd, Jack's dad. Here he is shown to also be Claire's estranged father, who is paying her mother's hospital bills while she's comatose. Initially Claire warms to him, but soon he reveals his intentions - he wants to euthanise her mother. She disowns him and is revealed to still be visiting her mother in hospital all the way up to the fateful flight to Los Angeles that saw her brought to the Island par avion. I really liked the reappearance of John Terry as Christian Shepherd, mainly because he just masters any scene that he's in, but because despite being a very minor character in the long run, it's epoisodes like this that make Christian just as developed as some of the main guys. Carole Littleton, who would come back in Season Five with a different head and miraculously out of her coma, wasn't so impressive.

Jack plays Rugby to scare chords from the soundtrack -
clearly this is an evil sport. From Wikia

     Like back in S.O.S, it's a little odd that part of this episode revolved around one of the more minor survivors still trying to get home. In real-time it's perfectly reasonable, but given all the crazy shit that's happened since, finding part of the story still holding that naiive Season One mentality of "Oh I'm sure we'll get rescued eventually" was an odd story decision. I also didn't see why both Charlie and Desmond were being so secretive with Claire - this is, after all, the same woman who was on the flight to L.A. in the first place because a psychic told her to take it. A fraudulent psychic. Who changed his prediction for no reason. Yeah, I'm still not over that.
      A la fin de la journée, Par Avion continues a string of good episodes for this season - a string which is about to wind and wind and make a beautiful plait of episodes, some of the best in the entire show. I suppose I was a little lacklustre towards this week because, as I've probably explained before, I'm not really a Claire fan. While characters like Claire and Charlie were fun to have in the intial lineup, when the show was about strangers coming together in adversity in a mysterious place, it's a very different show now - one that revolves around deep characters, an expansive mythos and trying to tell who's lying about what to whom and why. And these two lovebirds, the intriguing "Charlie's gunna die my visions" plot aside, don't really have the right personalities to fit into that show. Hence why Charlie gets written out at the end of this season, and Claire's character is mucked up at the end of the next one.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We finally get to see what put Locke in a wheelchair, as we once again discuss Locke's relationship with The Man From Tallahassee.

Review: Lost 3.11: Enter 77

Sayid begs for his life in Paris. From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Eleven - Enter 77
Written 9/3/14

One of Lost's most important recurring themes is guilt and redemption. Sawyer, Kate, Eko, Ana-Lucia, Michael - they all had a big storyline surround their quest for forgiveness for the things they'd done. But in the show as a whole, there is none so thorough a quest as that of Sayid Jarrah - a man whose crimes under the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein make him a particularly sensitive figure in a show made during the US' post-911 paranoia. While his story has been addressed many times on the show already (and would be ruined a bit in the next few seasons,) it still has enough emotional mileage to make this centric episode absolutely brilliant. Combine that with a new DHARMA station and an amazing villain, and you have Lost at its absolute finest.
     Following a bearing that he found on Eko's Prayer Stick, Locke leads Kate, Sayid and Rousseau in what he hopes is the direction of The Others' base. Sayid discovered a building in their path occupied by the same one-eyed man he and Locke saw in The Cost of Living, and together they incapacitate. The man is Mikail Bakunin, who claims to be the last member of the Dharma Initiative, left after The Others killed them all in a great Purge. Sayid soon realises that Mikail is an Other - and a dangerous one, at that. He finds a map which will lead them to the Baracks, The Others' base - meanwhile, Locke plays a chess game and inadvertantly sets off a timed explosion, rendering The Flame and all of its communications equipment useless. In an amusing sideplot, Hurley bests Sawyer at Ping-pong and prevents him from using any of his trademark nicknames for a week.
     In Sayid's flashback, we saw him working under another name in Paris a few years after the end of the Gulf War. He is approached by another restaurant owner who offers him twice the salary, before eventually revealing that his wife was one of Sayid's victims. Sayid continually denies torturing the man's wife, until she comes to him alone and tells him a story of how she saved a cat from being attacked on the streets. Sayid admits everything, and the man's wife lets him go, telling him that she is not willing to sink to his level of cruelty. Even though I don't feel like the episode covered any new ground for Sayid's arc, I did like the way the storyline was handled and Naveen Andrews played the storyline with the appropriate raw emotion that it deserved.

"In Soviet Russia..." Hehe. Like I'd actually make a Soviet
Russia joke. Suckers.

      The arrival of yet another DHARMA station, however brief it was, injected a lot of life into the episode, especially as Mikhail is an awesome narrator to be delivering its mythos. Mikhail's awesomeness throughout the episode crosses the line twice in just how brilliantly silly his badassery gets, from the epic yarn he spins about being the last DHARMA member to when he sees completely through Sayid's attempts at fact-finding and throws a tray of ice-tea at him. The fact that next episode will star both him and Danielle Rousseau makes me wonder if the show can withstand the sheer level of awesomeness that they bring to the show.
      Long story short, Enter 77 was a fantastic episode full of mythos, character development and a badass russian guy who is seriously channelling Rasputin. After my initial misgivings about the season's first arc and the transition into the season proper, I'm relieved to see that the season has gained its full momentum. Of course, most early-season Sayid episodes are great without having to try very hard, but it was the fact that this came after two episodes of varying quality that made the episode's conciseness hit with full force. It is a signal, perhaps, that this season is going to become more consistant.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We reach Lost's half-way mark, with Par Avion.

Review: Lost 3.10: Tricia Tanaka Is Dead

Enid Blyton's newest adventure, "Five Find A Volkswagen"
From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Ten - Tricia Tanaka Is Dead
Written between 4th and 8th March 2014

In the show's first two seasons, I was always a little uncertain as to what the theme of Hurley's episodes was supposed to be. They were silly and over the top for comic relief but at the same time they were quite deep and depressing. Hurley's life-story is what happens if you try and cartoonise Locke's, essentially, but I don't think the balance between those two elements fit quite as they needed to until this week, which gives us a mix of fluffy on-island story and depressing flashbacks as some light relief after last week's debacle.
       The main island plot was a fun diversion wherein Hurley discovered an overturned DHARMA van and strives to get it going again as an attempt to bring up the spirits of the camp. He recruits Jin and a newly-arrived Sawyer to his cause, and despite Jin's reservations about the van's engine quality, Hurley and Charlie manage to get it going in a joyous event. In Hurley's flashbacks, we see his father David abandon the family home, accidentally getting Hurley hooked on sugar in the process. Returning to the flashback events seen in Everybody Hates Hugo, we find that David returns in order to mooch off of Hurley's fortune. This only spurs Hurley on to visit Australia, as in Numbers, which becomes final when David takes him to a fake psychic and he sees through her fairly easily.
     Hurley's flashbacks and their uneasy attempt at tragedy comedy are always a little odd for me, especially as that combination and the way that each individual scene is played can skew everything in one direction or the other. Casting US comedy star Cheech Marin as David Reyes is a move which both inspires and puzzles, as he's both a very hateable figure and a very funny one. The same for the opening scene where one of Hurley's restaurants gets destroyed by a meteor when the titular reporter walks inside, the scene where Hurley visits the fake psychic (and slaps down a casual $10k to get her to talk), and the scene where Hurley confronts his father about the reason for his belated return. Although I suppose it was probably the episode's intention, I didn't know what to feel.

Yes, because obesity must only be due to childhood trauma
and is in no way related to the increased sugar consumption
forced upon consumers by corporations, the mass avaliability
of cheap food with little to no nutritional content, or the genetic
predisposition to produce excess adipose tissue or to become
immune to the effects of the hunger satisfaction hormone.
Obviously, us fat people are just screwed up by our daddies.
From Wikia

      Not a problem in the Island storyline, which was a bastion of unadulterated joy - for as long as it was there, that is. In a strange move, most of the episode was told in flashbacks, and the cuts to the present were frustratingly short, despite being a great deal more interesting to me. We haven't really had a chance to feel a "normal" beach camp feel since half-way through last season, and every time there was a fun moment with Hurley, Jin and Sawyer, we cut back to the icky ficky doom/slapstick/wtf of his flashbacks. And that was a shame, because the moment that Hurley starts the van, giving both him and Charlie the faith to carry on, is one of the series' most infectiously joyous. It did however give us one delicious development which excited me greatly - Kate has recruited Danielle Rousseau to help take back Jack from The Others.
     It took me three days to write this article. Not in a "I've been slaving over this masterpiece" kinda way, but more in a way which me reflects the fact that this season has finally shifted into its midsection in a very relaxed kinda way. Hurley's final flashback episode (before his flashforwards, flash-sideways and flashwtfs in the succeeding seasons) shone a light on his family life which took the more outlandish events of previous episodes and gave them a more heartfelt context, but the comedy and drama were so thickly intertwined that it was often hard to tell what the mood was or even what we were supposed to take from it, resulting in an atmosphere of lazy melancholy lit - one only relieved by the main island storyline and its beacons of hope both in-universe and for the rest of the season.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A badass Sayid episode with a one-eyed Russian and a Dharma station with an explosive... chess set. See if Locke will have the nerve to Enter 77.
P.S. I get very pissed off when the writers use Hurley's obesity as a plot point. They avoided it more than they did in Dave, but the fact they blamed his weight on childhood abandonment is just cruel and stupid. Shame on you guys.
    

Review: Lost 3.9: Stranger In A Stranger Land

This just in - the writers of this episode are using outdated
race tropes from 1950s war films. From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Nine - Stranger In A Stranger Land
Written between 3/3/14

Here we are. This is the bigg'un, the one I've been waiting for. A Lost episode with such a bad reputation that it did quite literally end the show, albeit with some very fancy padding. (About 64 episodes' worth, in fact). Even after some of the worst recesses of the final season, Stranger In A Stranger Land ticks so many boxes on the "why did you do this?" sheet that its reputation is assured. At the same time, the episode didn't strike in me the kind of inspired fanboy rage that plagues me in the later seasons - I can see why the writers might have thought that any part of this episode was a good idea. But, coming after two absolute crackers, that just doesn't cut it.
     The worst aspect of the episode for me is the flashback which takes up a fair chunk of the running time and is a shockingly backwards instance of Yellow Fever, in which Jack is the handsome white male travelling in the mysterious orient, before being seduced by a skimpy-clothed asian woman whom he uses and abuses in order to manipulate her magic power of "seeing people", before she gives him a tattoo in Chinese despite living her whole life in Thailand. Given this show's slightly more sensitive looks at Korea and Iraq, the fact that the writers of this episode see Thailand as fair-game for horrendously rascist stereotypes is just weird to me - as is the fact that Jack's an abusive Mighty Whitey dickbag who stalks and then assaults someone, and whom we're meant to feel sorry for when that comes back to bite him in the ass.
     Not that the main story was much better, and given that it signalled a major change for Jack's storyline that was difficult to reconcile. We see that Ben's stitches are infected, and at the same time Juliet is being tried by The Others for killing Danny Pickett. Her judge is Isabel, a swarthy woman played by Diana Scarwid, and who is never seen or mentioned again after this episode. Jack is forced to promise to be Ben's carer (seeing as Ethan was the only qualified surgeon The Others had) in exchange for leniency in Juliet's sentence, which apparently means that The Others instead brand her with a funny symbol. (Which again, is never mentioned again.) In one of the episode's few good developments, we saw that The Others were returning to their base on The Island, which makes me happy because The Barracks is one of my favourite Island locations. And then there was a third storyline running along with Kate, Sawyer and Alex's boyfriend Karl, where they rowed back to The Island, moaned, had a nice chat about stars, moaned, and argued incessantly.

Isabel is an Other bigshot - but she's never seen again.
From Wikia

      Ignoring that stupid fucking flashback story, the main problem I had with the story in the present was that it felt as though a lot of undevelopped ideas were being thrown around - and that's not really what Lost is supposed to do. After eight weeks of hearing nothing about The Others' justice system, suddenly this group of advanced, enlightened people becomes a savage society that practices capital punishment. Not to mention Isabel, who you think we'd have met at some point in the last eight weeks if she was that important. Nopt helping matters is the fact that Michael Emerson and Elizabeth Mitchell are acting their little hearts out to try and make this material work. And the guy that plays Karl clearly isn't aware that he needs to do anything like that. Even though he does. He really, really does.
     Stranger In A Stranger Land finishes this segment of The Others' plot, and gets us away from that tiresome Hydra Island set and one step closer to 1970s Dharma architecture. But it's main plotlines were segmented and when they weren't boring, they were contradictory to everything that came before and after. And the killing blow to the whole mess is Jack's flashback, which not only fits exactly nowhere in his flashback timeline, but which is some of the most horrendously offensive TV that Lost would produce until what they did with Sayid in Season Six. It's just not on, and it's the antithesis of what Lost should be representing.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Hey! Did you know that Hurley is unlucky? No? Well, we find out some more when the news comes in that Tricia Tanaka Is Dead

Review: Lost 3.8: Flashes Before Your Eyes

Desmond does this face a lot in this episode. It's
Henry Ian Cuisick's "future!" face. From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Eight - Flashes Before Your Eyes
Written 2/3/14

If there's one aspect of science fiction that I can't get enough of, it's Time Travel. It's what got me into the genre with Doctor Who, and it's been something that I've been fascinated with ever since I was a kid. I even wrote an article about it last year. (That link contains some spoilers to the rest of the show, as will most of this article.) Time Travel on Lost has always been pretty interesting, as it provides a bona fide example of an immutable timeline - which, of course, the writers will always twist into destiny and fate etc. . Although it wasn't that apparent at the time, Flashes Before Your Eyes sets down Lost's time-travel philosophy in a way that, while not that important now, would shape the mechanics of the next two seasons in ridiculously amazing ways.
     This episode is the first of a few in the show to present its flashback as a continuous stream in the middle of the ep. instead of cutting back and forth between the two plotlines, and this was very appropriate, as we saw Desmond reliving a short segment of his life before the Island as a direct consequence of turning the Hatch Failsafe Key. Back in 1996, Desmond is living with girlfriend Penny when he suddenly starts getting flash-forwards to the Island. After he is dismissed entirely by Penny's father Charles Widmore, his flashes start troubling him and, on the way to buying Penny's engagement ring, he meets Eloise Hawking. (Mother of Daniel Faraday from Seasons 4-6, who is quite knowledgable about Time Travel due to her son's self-paradox.) She tells him that all of his visions are true, and that while he may avoid breaking Penny's heart, he will always end up at the Island, as even with knowledge of his future he cannot change his path.
     This fits in very well with the show's later use of immutable timelines, except this time was slightly more flexibility between fixed events and quibbleable details. I assume that certain aspects of Desmond's knowledge were forgotten by the time he set off on his adventures, as they might have affected things quite considerably. It also fell into one of the episode's biggest quibbles for me - the fact that there was a quite easy way to work around Desmond's problem, but Hawking's pushing of the immutable timeline model as "fate" and "your true path" made him fuck up. That would later happen in Season Five and if you've ever read those reviews, you know how much it pissed me off. In this case, the convoluted path of "Desmond breaks Penny's heart, joins the army, joins a sailing race and then makes it to the Island to save the world" could have just as easily been turned into "Desmond spends five lovely years with Penny and then tells her that he's going away for three years, travelling to the Island and saving the world."

Luckily, Eloise doesn't appear again until Season 5. So no
more of this destiny bs until then, eh? From Wikia

      This episode also revealed that Desmond's recent premonitions all concern Charlie's inevitable death, setting up his story for this season. We were let to believe that Desmond was trying to save Claire, and I kinda ship Desmond/Claire so I was giggling there. But Charlie's stories really took a tumble last season what with all the outrageous jealousy (or Neelix moments as I might as well call them) for Locke of all people, the dip back into drug-hoarding and the assault on Sun on Sawyer's behalf. Don't worry, that'll get addressed this season. Ultimately I don't know whether knowing about Charlie's death this early in the season made it easier or harder to handle when it actually did happen - although I'd probably argue for the latter, as in the end it became Charlie's decision.
     Charlie's inevitable death at the end of the season marks a quite pivotal point in Lost history - the end of the long seasons, the beginning of more time-travel and sci-fi themes and a series of format changes that would re-define what Lost meant. It's somewhat appropriate to this episode's themes that it manages to predict all of those changes in a way which still manages to feel right in the context of the present goings on. Desmond centrics are always brilliant, and this introduction of a time-travel theme (continued in Season Four's The Constant) just makes it that much better for me. Last week I said I didn't like Flashes Before Your Eyes - and quite frankly, with an episode as perfect as this, I'm not sure why.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We return to Jack and Juliet shenanigans in what is the worst episode of the show - the episode that drove the show's producers to set a limit to the number of episodes they had left to produce. Asking the burning questions that no-body wanted to know about, it's Stranger In A Strange Land.

Review: Lost 3.7: Not In Portland

Even when semi-conscious and undergoing surgery, Ben
manages to be a master manipulator. From Wikia

Lost - Season Three, Episode Seven - Not In Portland
Written 1/3/14

I really can't tell you how much of a breath of fresh air Juliet brings to the series. It's not just that Elizabeth Mitchell is a fantastic actress, although that's mostly the reason, but it's also that Juliet brings yet another new perspective to the series that is really needed in order to bring us into The Other storyline. Finally choosing to focus on Juliet and her origins introduces us into the season proper with this episode, a tour-de-force of characterisation brilliance and drama which gave me everything that the six-episode arc couldn't deliver. Oh, and Danko's in it, which always makes things better.
     On the Island, Jack's ruse allows Kate and Sawyer to escape, but it's not long before Juliet points out that Jack's too much of a principled nice guy to let Ben die, and Pickett is sent after them. They meet Alex Rousseau, who gives them her boat after they help save her boyfriend, Karl, from a leftover DHARMA psychological torture device. Mid-surgery, Ben wakes up and, despite the fact that he now knows about both Jack's plan and Juliet's attempt to kill him, she asks for Juliet and has a private word with him, after which she declares her intent to help Kate and Sawyer escape in exchange for Ben's safety. As Jack finishes Ben's surgery, Juliet shoots a raging Pickett in order to help Kate, Sawyer and Karl escape, with Alex forced to stay behind to be there when her "father" Ben awakens.
     In her flashback, we find Juliet working as a timid lab researcher in a Miami fertility clinic, where all of her research is controlled by her slimy ex-husband Edmund, who despite their seperation still has a psychological hold on her. Juliet is pioneering a treatment to help infertile women get pregnant, starting with her sister, a cancer survivor who always wanted children. Juliet is approached by a Richard Alpert of Mittellos Bioscience, who intrigues her with a strange scan of a woman's uterus, but she jokes that the only way that she could go would be if Edmund were hit by a bus. The day after her sister reveals that she's pregnant, Edmund is killed right in front of her by an errant bus driver, and Alpert approaches again, pretending not to know anything about it.

The Others ensure that Juliet's oily husband gets hit
by a bus. From Wikia

     After six weeks where flashbacks were very few and far between (and rarely that good when they did appear), Juliet's flashback is given a lot more screentime. She has the advantage of not having to cover over new ground, and while contributed to the episode's success, novelty alone is not what sold it. In the time we've known her, Juliet has been portrayed as a disillusioned, scheming woman whose true motives were unclear. This episode makes the point of comparing her differences and similaries to the Survivors - she was led to the Island under false pretences, and before their manipulation of her she was a very different person indeed. What led to Juliet changing so much is explored over three centric episodes (this one, One of Us and The Other Woman.)
     Not In Portland brought back what LOST used to be, in such stark contrast to the previous episode that I couldn't quite comprehend it. Within a single flashback episode, Juliet's character became vastly more three dimensional - made even more impressive by the fact that this episode wasn't even specifically about her, as it had a lot of work to do in rapidly pushing along the storylines that the initial arc of the season left it with. And when an episode of Lost gets both its action and its characterisation so perfectly spt on and mixed together like a fine paella... that's when I'm glad to be doing this whole shebang.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Most Lost fans love it, but I don't, even though it's a funky time-travel episodes... Desmond Flashes Before Your Eyes.