Welcome to the Idiot Vox for Lost! As a dedicated fan of the show since season one, I’m excited to bring to you snarky commentary after each episode.
As we all know, Lost is far more infamous for its endless mysteries than its ingenious solutions to them. As such, each episode recap will be in the form of questions that the most recent episode raised, and answers that we finally got.
WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.
Why don’t they just kill Sawyer? Actually, that’s just a rhetorical question; despite his incredible bullet-dodging skills showcased in this episode (it only takes one shot to kill each of the Others, but Sawyer manages to dodge fifty or so). Of course, we know that none of those bullets will hit him because we desperately need a little bit of humor. Humor in the form of nicknames and an exaggeratedly white-trashy speaking style. (This episode’s gem: “Calm down Chicken Little, the sky ain’t fallin’ just yet.”) Oh, Sawyer, we know you’ve become a good guy recently, but can’t we go back to loving to hate you again? Oh, and in case you’re one of those who pay attention to anything that could be a hint as to future plot twists, during their game of Risk, Hurley insightfully says, “Australia’s the key to the whole game.” Or the key to the whole show?
Who is the most bad-ass character on the show?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. The answer, after an ass-kicking scene involving a Dharma parka (Dharma: the new North Face!) in the Sahara desert, is clearly Ben. We’ve known this for a while; don’t fuck with Benjamin Linus. Since we’ve had this drilled into our brains for a couple seasons now, it’s nice to finally see that the man is fallible when he loses something precious to him. Setting him on a fully justified quest for revenge. Except, oh wait, he’s out to kill someone that we actually care about. Damn it, how many characters are they going to kill? Are the Oceanic Six really the only ones who survive the blood bath of the next two seasons?
Is it just me, or are there always more Others? Okay, first we had our original group. Then we had the Others, or the Tail-enders, who pretty much all died. Then we had the Others, Ben’s crew, some of whom are now allies. Now, we have the Others being Charles Whidmore’s evil mercenary henchmen who are after Ben, which brings me to my next question.
Is Daniel Faraday a good guy or a bad guy? He’s quiet, kind of unassuming, not very in-your-face. Clearly knows his stuff, I mean, the guy helps Desmond get out of that whole time travel pickle. But then he blatantly lies, in Jack’s face, about what the Morse code message says. We know that this group of Others wants Ben, so why are Daniel and that red-headed girl still staying around with the other group, if they don’t intend to kill them (they would have already been able to do so) or help them off the island? Does Daniel have any way to contact the boat anymore? Whose orders is he acting under? What are they waiting for?
And lastly, How the hell does Ben control Big Smoky? Can he really control it, and was he the one who set it on those intruders, or was that just a pleasant coincidence? Then, by extension, was he the one who neglected to kill Locke so many seasons ago, and the one who killed Eko? Is Big Smoky really just Ben’s puppet? Or Jacob’s puppet? I’m not going to even ask who is Jacob, because I’m sure by the time we get a satisfactory answer to that one, it’ll be the series finale.
Answers we got this episode. Not too many, unfortunately. We found out why Sayid joined Ben as a hitman – we should have known that only something as catastrophic as the murder of his One True Love could inspire such hateful revenge as seen in previous episodes. However, a part of me is just glad that he found her after all those years of looking. No other mysteries were solved; tune in next week to see if Jack dies of appendicitis.