* Look, I’m a person who likes Lost a whole lot, I think I’ve been up front about that. And I liked this episode a whole hell of a lot. Several moments had me laughing and cheering with delight, sitting there on my couch with my cat: The glimpse of the Statue, the revelation that Sawyer is a Dharma Initiative bigwig, and of course the Sawyer/Juliet hook-up. Woo!
* On that last point, I can’t stress enough how happy hooking Juliet and Sawyer up makes me. That’s a goddamn stroke of genius is what that is: “Hey, how about we take the two romantic leads you could actually stand to be around for longer than 30 seconds and put them together?” By all means, Lost writers! I have a bad, bad feeling that Sawyer’s 100 Days in Heaven with Kate are going to trump his three years with Juliet, unfortunately, but I’ll take what I can get. (Particularly if it means we get to watch Elizabeth Mitchell lazily roll around in bed with her shirt off. Sigh.)
* So for that reason, and just the kick of seeing our heroes in Dharma jumpsuits rubbing elbows with poor doomed Horace and the rest of the gang, I really like how this three-year jump has been handled. Plus, as my pal Matthew Perpetua pointed out to me, this was a way to invest the Dharma/Others War backstory with a sense of urgency, instead of relegating it to flashbacks or infodumps.
* That said, my big concern about this move is something that always happens on TV, especially on Lost, which is that the writers and audience alike tend to conflate screen time with actual time. So while Sawyer’s relationships with Juliet, Miles, Daniel, Jin, and even some Dharma people should probably be more intense and important to him than his relationships with Hurley, Jack, Sun, and even Kate, they’re not going to be treated that way because those years together happened off screen, while his 100 days with the castaways took place over the space of four seasons in the real, non-fictional world. It’s a bit like how the characters rarely seem to think about the deaths of Boone or Shannon or Ana-Lucia or Libby (let alone Nikki, Paulo, or any of the redshirts) even though they happened just a few weeks ago in screen time, because those episodes were written, shot, and aired years ago in some cases in actual time. (Though it seems to me that Terry O’Quinn seems to keep Boone in mind when appropriate even though it’s not explicitly called for in the script, simply because he’s a talented and intelligent actor.) I mean, this whole thing is sort of a quibble, and I admit it’s entirely possible for brief but intense relationships to trump long-term but less traumatically engendered ones, but it’s still gonna irk me a bit.
* But who knows, maybe Sawyer will be like “hey, nice to see you, but don’t fuck things up for my pal Horace.” Maybe someone will have gone native, so to speak, and genuinely feel allegiance to and affinity for Dharma. It’s a surprising show, and stranger things have happened.
* I’m glad to see more Dharma stuff in general. I’d always felt like they’d ended up getting short shrift–having the origin of their use of the Numbers and our only solid glimpse of Alvar Hanso relegated to the not-quite-canon Lost Experience ARG, having Ben and the Others kill them and take their shit D&D-style, simply revealing that they had little or nothing to do with anything that was happening to the castaways. But I was always still interested in who they were and how they came to be, to quote Batman–how did they find the Island? What were they really trying to achieve there? Were they the hippie-science commune they seemed to be, or were they sinister in some way, as implied by the deception in many of “Dr. Marvin Candle”‘s orientation films? How do they tie in to Widmore and/or Paik? What’s the source of their conflict with the Others? Is it merely their presence on the Island, or something more? What happened during Ben’s years with them that we haven’t seen? What caused characters like Charlotte’s mother and Annie to leave? I’m hoping we see a lot of this go down.
* Speaking of Ben, where are he and his dad during Sawyer et al’s sojourn among Dharma? Are they there yet? Have they already left? Are Sawyer and the gang simply ignoring them? Surely it’d be tempting for Sawyer just to wring the little bastard’s neck, no? Does Daniel persuade him not to? Whatever happened, happened, right?
* This show is uniformly great at casting villains. Terry O’Quinn initially, William Mapother, M.C. Gainey, Michael Emerson, Alan Dale, Elizabeth Mitchell initially, Andrew Divoff, Lance Reddick, and most notably in this episode, Nestor Carbonell. God, what an unnerving guy. And a handsome devil! Just a quiet, sensual menace. I’m glad he became a big deal and didn’t get dropped after one episode like Diana Scarwid’s Isabel.
* Unrelated theory I’ve been mulling over for the past week and that other, smarter people already probably beat me to long ago: I think Libby worked for Charles Widmore. I didn’t put it together until after Matthew Abaddon told Locke that his job was to get people where they needed to be, but of course that’s exactly what Libby did with Desmond, and presumably that’s why she was watching Hurley inside the asylum.
* I wonder if the presence of various ’04 castaways back here in the ’70s is what gave rise to the various “lists” that the Others referenced a couple seasons back. Perhaps they were on the lookout for these specific people to come back.
* Who do you think Amy and Horace’s baby is? Anyone we know? If he was born in ’77 or so, that would make him a little older than me–who matches that description? Charlie, Boone? Maybe Hurley (too young?) or Daniel (too old? already has a mother but she could have adopted him?)? And of course time travel complicates things further. I wonder.
I laughed so hard at “your buddy out there with the eyeliner.” It must be so much fun to write lines like that for Sawyer, because you know Holloway’s just gonna nail them.
I really liked this episode too, for a lot of the reasons you already articulated quite nicely.
And “That looks like a sonic fence or something” may be my favorite “ridiculous line delivered with no hint of irony” in a long time.
Following up on your point, I guess really Kate should be closer to Jack than Sawyer having lived and loved with one as opposed to having a fling on an island with another. Of course there is something to be said for idealizing the one who got away in both Kate and Sawyer’s cases, but in real life it probably wouldn’t trump three good years of true love. I’m willing to suspend disbelief to some degree because it’s a great show, but yeah, I’m rooting for Sawyer/Juliet as well. It would actually be a neat twist if they kept the romance that made real world sense.
I don’t know. In general, I’d be totally cool with Sawyer and the bunch bailing on the Dharma gang because it was pretty well established that they’re still waiting for Jack and the others to come back and actively seeking that out three years later. But you’re right…the Juliet thing is going to be bothersome. I have enough faith in the writers that they don’t just gloss over this, though. I mean, they took the time to show that Sawyer and Juliet were happy and seemingly really in love, didn’t they? I can’t imagine a total betrayal of that in one week’s time.
Oh, I certainly don’t see Sawyer ditching Juliet by next week, I’m more talking about the down the road decision where he’ll have to choose and I feel like he’ll pick Kate against all reason.
And even if they were waiting for Jack and company the whole time, it’s tough to think they wouldn’t perhaps as Sean said “go native” having lived with these folks for roughly six times as long as they did their original crew.
I’d think it’d be practical for Sawyer and Co. to bounce out on the Dharma folks pretty easily, what with their whole relationship with the Dharmas having been built on lies from the start.
I’m more interested in how you FAKE that you’re from another time. Even, say, 20 years ago. I’d be lost in a conversation regarding current events with a group of folks from 1989, much less a conversation that involved details about anything anything happening before then.
And, yeah, Sean, I think Ben just hasn’t arrived on the island yet.