Good vs Evil: Jacob & “Locke”

It’s been a while since I did a Good vs. Evil post, and I’ve put this one off for a long time.  I mostly want to write this now because it seems like everyone is grasping at straws trying to figure out if we’ve been misled, maybe Jacob isn’t as nice as we like to believe.  I think it’s possible that people have lost some perspective about the issues.

And one disclaimer before I continue.  I feel very strongly we can discuss whether someone is good or evil.  I know many people dislike it when I debate these things, they wants more vagueness, they don’t want their favorite characters pigeon-holed.  But I like drawing lines in the sand.  I want there to be barriers between good and evil actions.  In the end of this show there will be two side, and I don’t think they will both be good and both be evil.  I’m pretty sure there will be villains and there will be heroes.

And another thing, I have to write this post about Jacob and “Locke”/Smokey because they are undoubtedly on opposite sides, if I write about one of them then it affects the other one.

606 – Sundown

Review:

This episode was called Sundown, I was expecting a Sun and Jin episode and I was hoping that by the end of the episode Sun would be shot down in at least one of the two timelines.  I was way off.  This was bound to happen since I don’t watch any commercials for the upcoming episodes.

This episode was about Sayid instead of Sun.  And guess who’s back?  Nadia!!  If this was season three I would be excited.  But after Sayid and Nadia got their Happily ever after (almost) I stopped caring about her.  This flashback really just dragged on for me.  It kinda set up a Jin and Sun episode, but it’s not like that’s getting me too excited.

On the Island things were more fun.  Sayid was playing an assassin for both sides.  For a short time I actually liked him again, but then he went back to the mindless killing machine so I can go back to ignoring him.  If there’s anything that I can be excited about it’s the fact that we’ll probably never have another Sayid-centric episode every again.  Huzzah!

I have to mention this somewhere, this is probably the best place.  The scene with Sayid, Claire and Kate walking through the ruined Temple with Claire’s lullaby playing off tune in the background was unique in a weird way.  That was very un-Lost-like.

But it sounds like I really hated this episode, that’s not quite true.  I really liked the Kate and Claire reunion and the last six minutes were pure energy.  This episode set up some great groups, and I’m really looking forward to the next episode.  Half of this episode was bad, another third was pretty good and a tenth of it was great then there were some commercials  I think that leaves us with about a 4.5/10.0

605 – Lighthouse

Review:

This might have been one of the only Jack flashbacks/forwards/sideways that I really enjoyed.  And I have to hand it to the writers.  I’m thoroughly impressed that they managed to make me care about Jack and his relationship with his newly introduced preteen son.  If I had heard that Jack was going to have a son and he would have parenthood issues I would have rolled my eyes and wrote this episode off as a loss.  But I was surprised at how much I cared.

On the Island Hurley was leading Jack to Jacob’s spy-tower.  There we saw a very familiar list of names.  Jacob told Hurley that someone, number 108 on the list, was coming to the Island and Hurley had to help him get there.  No luck in this episode, but I’ll bet we’ll hear more about that later.

Meanwhile Claire finally did some talking.  Yeah, she’s crazy.  She’s also BFFs with “Locke” although she somehow doesn’t seem to know his name.  Poor Jin is now stuck with Claire and Locke and he knows way too much.  He’s in survival mode and he’s surrounded by murderers.  Also his leg is mangled.  This guy has been through the wringer over the last two seasons.

This was a good episode.  It set up a BSG reminiscent relationship between Hurley and Jacob, it had a surprising and effective reveal of Jack’s new son, it ramped up the anticipation about Claire and what the deuce she’s going to do, and it started two fun guessing games: who’s David’s mother and who’s coming to the Island (skip down the bottom of the post for my guesses and a couple of polls).  Overall a solid episode.  7.5/10.0

603 – What Kate Does

Review:

Boooring.  No I’m just being mean.  Kate episodes are always meant to take things down a notch.  We can’t just go full blast through a season with Smokey destroying things in every episode.  Sometime we have to deal with characters and emotions.  This seems to happen in every season, we get a Kate flashback and it slows the story to a crawl.  I actually don’t always hate Kate flashbacks, but it usually takes me a few years to appreciate them.  Combine that with my general disinterest in Claire and hate for Sayid and we have the makings of a truly boring episode.

Here are the parts of the episode I did like: Aldo’s return, Hurley’s new leadership role, Ethan’s surprise return, and half of Dogen’s explanation of the Infection.  Claire’s Island return was also very surprising, but I’ll bet we’ll come back to that next week or the week after.

I’m still a little buzzed from the fact that Lost is back on, but not too excited to ignore the fact that this episode did almost nothing for me.  3.5/10.0