Wading in the Velvet Sea

The Flashback

Sun, we hardly knew ye! Shacking up with everyone’s favorite Yul Brenner lookalike. Very bad, Sun.

That being said, in much the way that last week’s episode shed very little light on what we didn’t know of the narrative in question, this week’s flashback gave us one big tasty morsel (Sun’s infidelity) and then a lot of repetitious plot points. Sun’s father is evil. Jin feels trapped. He wonders if all this is worth Sun’s love. Sun consequently turns away and gets to know Jae, getting to know all about him, in fact. Jin is really good at almost killing people. All this we knew.

And the point? I am struggling upon first view to get the full impact. Maybe, given what happens in the hull of the boat, that, “it takes a liar to know a liar” is the lesson to be gleaned from all this? From an early age, she’s mastered the art of deception. She lies and lies well and quite possibly lies often. Sayid recognizes her skill in this, and in fact most likely suspects the baby isn’t Jin’s at all. And because of who she is, she clearly doesn’t get fooled as easily by the lies of Colleen the way many were fooled by Ben in The Swan station. (Although, to be fair, she didn’t kill in cold blood, and basically pulled an Ana-Lucia. This show is like a constant PSA for stricter gun control laws. Anyone with even the slightest hint of a jitter turns into The Terminator on this show.)

In short, once again, we see just how not-so-nice one of our Losties can be. Sun up until this point has been portrayed as one of the most noble of the bunch, and now we see she can be calculating, manipulatively, and deceptive. Can't wait for the flashback where we see Rose and Bernard running the black marke for underaged sex slaves. That should be a hoot.

(Also, anybody else think Jin was screaming “WAAAAAALT” in Korean while in the water? Couldn’t have just been me.)

The Fishbiscuit

“You tasted like…fishbiscuit,” made me like Kate for about half a minute until I remembered how much I’m despising her character lately. (Is anyone more easily or quickly captured by The Others than she is? Honestly! I can’t believe she didn’t crash land directly into the Hydra cage upon Flight 815’s descent.) They weren’t kidding, those producers, when they said they were going to up the ante on the romance front this year.

But more to the point…what was up with the work-share program in the jungle? Are we supposed to believe that The Others are a malevolent wing of Habitat for Humanity? Very perplexing, and I’m sure we’ll have to wait weeks to see a visual payoff (I am imagining a crane shot, a la the one from “?”, to finally illuminate what they are doing. And it better not be a basketball court, damnit.)

Adding to the mystery is Juliet’s presence. She’s a social psychologist (or parapsychologist, if you believe my theory she’s a psychic), and has no ostensible reason for being on the site. And yet, there she is, monitoring the progress. Of what, though? The work, or the relationship? Clearly, this situation has escalated things between Sawyer and Kate. The question will be in this is merely a function of circumstance or if in fact those circumstances were put into play to fully allow feelings to grow. (Ostensibly so a horrible choice has to be made at the end of the “experiment”. Which leads to…)

The Deal

Very, very, very intriguing last scene, and one that seemingly answered about eight questions with such speed that by the fifth, I was truly rattled. It was like taking a shower while someone’s using the sink, and getting used to that pressure, and suddenly getting overwhelmed once they stopped brushing their teeth.

So, according to Ben Linus: he’s lived on the island his entire life, he can come and go as he pleases, but chooses NOT to do so, and has contact with the outside world, as evidenced by the 2004 World Series footage. (Sigh. Two years ago? Really? Feels like forever. BTW, nice payoff to all the Red Sox mentions over the years. Also, this may be an absolutely HUGE clue that Jack’s dad ain’t dead, and is an Other, since that particular piece of trivia is the one that broke Jack’s will. Or, you know, not. Just throwing that out there so I can claim to be right later.)

The big question, naturally, is what does Ben want Jack to do?

The Others

The last scene also explains the first big scene involving Ben: namely, why does he want the boat? At first I thought it was silly to be so desperate for a boat: after all, if they wanted one so badly, why did they give their boat to Michael? Turns out, our boy Ben wants the boat for Jack, as a way off the island.

Which points out once again Ben’s essentially an improv artist on a large scale: he takes what he is given and immediately puts it to best use. What’s intriguing to me is not only that he was thinking four steps ahead of the Losties for about the 800th time in 3 weeks on the island, but that the news of the boat truly rattled Ben in a way we’ve never seen before. In fact, when news of the boat comes, it’s only the third time we’ve ever seen him not in the presence of a Lostie (the other two being the bookend scenes of Episode 1 of this year). The fear in his eyes made him human, and therefore a helluva more interesting than the up-until-now virtually omnipotent leader we’ve come to know.

The loss of Colleen will also add an interesting dynamic to the show, I believe, in that it will undoubtedly have a ripple affect upon her husband’s attitudes (that was her husband/boyfriend, right?) towards Sawyer and Kate. Colleen told Sun that the two sides were not enemies, which echoed Ben’s statement to Michael at the end of Season 2 that The Others were in fact the good guys. Both statements could be true, and both could be false. It’s hard to justify the actions of The Others as anything but evil unless you consider the possibility that they see it as their sacred duty to purge the Losties of all impurities: whether they be social, psychological, or spiritual. After all, one element of the Dharma Initiative, according to The Orientation video, mentions "social utopian..." before cutting off. Are The Others trying to maintain that society, no matter what the cost?

In any case, the Others are winging it, plain and simple. They are drawing upon great resources and intellect and expertise, but are Week 6 into a plan that started the moment it was conceived. They are traveling down the tracks, but they are laying those tracks down one by one just before riding over them.

I’ve said on many occasions: I don’t want The Others to truly think they are evil. Villains are only interesting if they believe in their hearts that they are the heroes of the story. The fact that, here in the beginning of Season 3, we still can’t figure out which side is which, means this is a damn good show.

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OK, now your thoughts. Fire away!