SPOILER WARNING

* First of all, the Ewoks do not suck. “The Ewoks suck” is the kind of thing Star Wars nerds who are insecure about being Star Wars nerds and feel like they have to be tough guys about it–the worst, most insufferable kind of Star Wars nerds–say in lieu of whipping their dicks out and measuring them and yelling “see?!?!” The Ewoks are awesome. They look like teddy bears and fight like the Viet Cong. If given the choice between living among humans for the rest of my life and living among Ewoks, the choice would be it’s not even a choice. Ewoks every time. What I’m saying is that the Ewoks are better than you.

* Second of all, fun episode. I like Miles–he brings a different tone to the show in terms of how his character works, something a little harder to get a handle on thanks to both how he’s written and how Ken Leung performs him. For example, like every single other character on the entire show and approximately 90% of all the characters in nerd-centric fiction, he has daddy issues, but he doesn’t play them in the hard-exterior-surrounds-wounded-puppy manner everyone else does, not even after an entire episode dedicated to pushing him into that place. My read on him is that the combination of not having a father/being told his father rejected him and his mother with being able to hear the thoughts of dead people makes him has just made him think life is all some big cosmic joke, so why bother? Leung plays this like he honestly could say “fuck this” and walk right off the show at any moment. It’s intriguing.

* I think his best moment in this episode was when he returned his money to the grieving father, not to do the right thing by the guy, but to lay down the hard truth on him. He didn’t seem to derive any schadenfreude or pleasure from it, which is what saved it from being too on the nose–he just sort of spat it out and split, like his own internal hardness forced him to do it but he couldn’t contemplate deriving any kind of satisfaction from it (either out of cruelty or out of being a better person and returning the stolen cash). I didn’t anticipate the scene working out that way, and it was a pleasure.

* In his Lost recap this week, Todd Van Der Werff points out that this episode felt like it came from an earlier season. We have a first-time flashbacker for the first time in a while, and the forward movement on any of the show’s mysteries is pretty minimal. Back in Season Two or so, having an episode where one of the biggest revelations is that some redshirt got killed by electromagnetism would be par for the course, but nowadays everything’s jam-packed. I kind of liked that throwback feel.

* The other revelation this episode, besides the kinda non-revelation that Daniel was in Michigan, is that one of the dudes from the new set of plane-crash castaways is somehow in on the mysteries and working against Widmore and his forces, and is also using the “what lies in the shadow of the statue” catchphrase. I assumed this means he’s working for Ben, but a lot of my friends (and a lot of Internet speculation) argue that there’s a third party at work here. I’m not sure why that conclusion’s being drawn–but during the show I complained that whoever that guy was, him and his cronies should have just killed Miles if they wanted to make sure he didn’t go to work for Widmore, and now that the third-party theory has been suggested to me I think that’s the best available evidence that he isn’t working with Ben. Ben’s dudes would have shot Miles from across the street.

* Also, Ilyana is another “shadow of the statue” catch-phraser, and she claims to be working for the family of one of Sayid’s victims, and what do we really know about them that we didn’t learn from Ben? So maybe the third-party theory is correct. On the other hand, remember the blonde German lady Sayid dated for a while before they mutually betrayed and shot each other? I’m pretty sure she really was working for Widmore, no?

* I think the Kate/Roger sequence of events was surprisingly rich. On the one hand, Roger is right–Kate was involved with everything that’s happened to poor little Ben. But on the other hand, he’s kind of accidentally right–that is the kind of thing that only a paranoid drunk who believes the worst of everyone (including his own kid, when he hasn’t been shot and kidnapped) would think about a lady who gave blood to save his son’s life then tried to comfort the dad when the kid went missing. And on a third hand that I’ve grown for the purposes of this paragraph, it’s another instance of Sawyer’s caution and Juliet’s pessimism proving out over Kate’s “we’ve got to DO SOMETHING”ism–she could have simply kept her head down and let Sawyer run the show as he saw fit, but instead she’s pretty much fucked them without even trying. It’s downright Jackish, is what it is.

* Oh yeah, Dr. Marvin Candle/Pierre Chang is Miles’s father, duh. At least they made the reveal funny: “That douche is my dad” takes away a bit of the anti-climax sting.

* Is it just me or is Hurley becoming less of the common-sense audience stand-in and more of the “I’m too slow to follow this show” audience stand-in?

* Clip show? Boo!

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