WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. LIKE WHOA.
Summary
Apparently, all of my freaking out over the ending of the last episode is unjustified, as I realize the moment that I read the title of this episode. The rules of Lost time travel are hard and fast, and despite Hurley’s attempt to believe differently, are nothing like the rules of Back to the Future. Whatever happened, happened, we just don’t know what happened because it’s still about to happen. Or something like that.
This episode is Kate-centric, which means that we finally get an answer as to what happened to Aaron. The show teases us a little bit with a flashback that makes it seem as though a creepy Claire look-a-like abducts Aaron in a supermarket, but in fact, Kate leaves him in the care of Claire’s mother when she decides to go back to the island.
We learn that little Ben doesn’t die immediately from the Sayid-inflicted gun wound. The show attempts to make that asshole Roger Linus a sympathetic character who’s just worried about his son, but I hope no one was actually fooled. Kids who aren’t teenagers are primed in general to look up to their dads; Roger definitely has done things to deserve his kid’s animosity.
This episode also goes into Kate’s strange friendship with one of Sawyer’s exes that he conned, Cassidy. Apparently, when Sawyer whispered in Kate’s ear before he jumped from the helicopter, he told her to take care of his daughter. Over the next three years, Kate brings Aaron to visit Cassidy, and poetically, little Aaron and Sawyer’s daughter Clementine become playmates. Cuuuute.
Back on the Island, little Ben is going to die and Jack refuses to perform life-saving surgery on him, knowing that he grows up to be Ben Linus. Juliet doesn’t have the medical skills to save him, so she suggests to Kate and Sawyer that they take the dying boy to the Others. In a super-creepy scene, Richard Alpert agrees to take him. However, he warns, it means that Ben will change. He’ll lose his innocence, and always be one of the Others. Yikes.
The last scene is big Ben talking to Locke, ending a truly awesome episode. I love the time travel stuff, the flashbacks with Kate and Aaron’s relationship, and of course, bringing the Others back into the plot. Overall, a success.
Quotes:
Most Ironic:Locke, to Ben: “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Best 80’s Reference:
Miles: “What are you doing, Tubby?”
Hurley: “Checking to see if I’m disappearing.”
Most Loaded Statement: Jack to Kate: “You didn’t like the old me, Kate.”
Questions:
We still don’t know: What happened to Faraday?
What was it that the Others did to Ben to make him forget that Sayid was the one who shot him?
What happened to the DHARMA Initiative that wipes them out, and how exactly is Ben involved?
How is Locke going to make everything better?