SPOILERS ON THE WAY SO LOOK OUT
* Now this is podracing!
* Alright, so what did we have in this episode. We had cameos from Michael and, extensively, from Libby. These are the kinds of cameos that I personally really love on this show–not Arzt or whoever, not even various Others types, but the characters who really mattered back in Seasons One and Two, before (I think) the game plan for the remainder of the series was fully firmed up. It’s important to me to feel like those characters and their plights matter as much in the world of the show as they mattered to me as a viewer, you know?
* And even beyond that, I was always awfully fond of Michael, whose downfall was one of the first signs we got, along perhaps with Locke’s devolution from Jungle Wolverine to neurotic button-pusher, that the show was willing to really sully its heroes, however temporarily.
* I also liked Libby. We’ve still got a few more feet of Libby mystery to dig through, of course–we have no idea why she was in the mental hospital in the “real” universe, or whether it was really just coincidence that she bumped into Desmond and gave him a boat. I always assumed she was one of Widmore’s agents, like Abbadon or perhaps Mrs. Hawking. But this gave us some cross-dimensional closure on her and Hurley’s truncated love affair, which was one of the show’s least convincing and therefore somehow most convincing romances. And Cynthia Watros, who should wear sundresses as often as possible, gave a bedraggled, barely-keeping-it-together performance that was touchingly optimistic despite it all. I really wanted things to work out for her here, you know? I’m glad they did, more or less.
* So what else did we have? We had Ilana blowing the fuck up! Hahahaha! I can’t believe they went to the “old dynamite from the Black Rock blowing someone the fuck up unexpectedly” well once again, and that it worked as well as it did. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character’s. Again, I assume we’ll get a little more detail on Ilana at some point, but Ben’s assessment seemed accurate: The Island was done with her. I still wonder if “the Island” is a separate entity, in terms of exerting influence on what happens, from Jacob and the Man in Black, but I take his point. Anyway, good, I wasn’t much of an Ilana fan, and I think giving her this kind of ending gives her more oomph than she otherwise had.
* We had a full-fledged, no messing around, seriously guys on the Internet we’re making this as clear as we possibly can ANSWER! The whispers are dead people stuck on the Island. So it turns out is really is purgatory, for some people at least. Let me know when Lostpedia is finished going through all the whispers’ appearances and figures out who was probably whispering in each one and why. This explanation works fine for me, if you were wondering, though I imagine “ghosts” will be unacceptable to the LOST IS SERIOUS BIZNESS crowd.
* We had Fake Locke tossing Desmond down a well! Hahahahaha! Poor guy. Somehow I think things will work out for him anyway. I know this wasn’t the same well Locke went down couple seasons ago, but given all the tunnels and passageways under the Island, I wonder if Desmond can turn the donkey wheel without being teleported?
* We had Ultimate Richard/Ben/Miles team-up! Can’t wait for the walking-through-the-jungle banter that combo will serve up.
* Crap, I feel like I’m missing some more stuff I was really excited about! Dammit.
* No bad guy in Hurley’s flashsideways, did you notice? Unless you count Chang/Candle/Halliwax.
* Jack’s resignation of the presidency went down a little more smoothly than I’d worried it would with me. I don’t wanna see him turn into the happy wanderer, that’s my concern about a Jack who can let go, but I’m glad they’re directly addressing that failure has consequences, and his change of behavior makes sense.
* The owner of a fried chicken fast-food chain sponsoring the humane society? Yeah, right.
* Desmond’s a GQMF in addition to being a timecop. It was fun watching him traipse around the flashsideways, all blithely bringing people to consciousness and shit–but it was even more fun watching that get flipped on its head when he ran over a man in a wheelchair. He’s being positively Jacobian in his serene weirdness in both worlds.
* Haha, I take a contrarian’s pleasure in watching Desmond a) get tossed down a well, and b) run over a cripple.
* Dr. Linus on perv patrol. Love it.
* I found the swagger of Fake Locke and the silence of Dark Sayid good and sinister in this episode. I particularly like how Sayid’s now all but an extension of Fake Locke, answering only to him, even speaking only to him.
* Basically, what I want to communicate is that a lot happened in this episode! It was all over the place, fast and furious, and at nearly every pre-commercial cliffhanger, since I was watching it via TiVo and fastforwarding through the commercials, I worried that was the end of the show, since they’d packed so much in. They even added an “extra” flashsideways segment, if you will. Last week I expressed skepticism that the Desmond episode meant we’d arrived at the “okay, it’s on now” segment of the season, but I stand corrected, apparently! Edge of your seat stuff.
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