The following post discusses last night's episode of "Lost," "Namaste."
I don't have too much to say about last night's episode of "Lost," for a couple of reasons.
First, it was one of those "moving all the parts into place" episodes, and as such, it was perfectly fine. There weren't really any OMG moments, unless you count the reveals of Christian and Young Ben, but because I can't resist reading the cast lists that ABC puts out in advance (I know, bad me), I knew those characters were going to be on the show. Even so, the appearance of Christian was suitably ominous.
Second, I spent much of the day in transit, after a very fun but very exhausting quick jaunt to New York. Nothing caps off a couple busy days of work and travel like sitting on the tarmac at JFK for a long time. I'm pretty tired, so I'll just list the things I liked. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts, as always.
- I am really liking Sawyer this season. Josh Holloway is bringing his A-game, and it was great to see him square off with Jack, in a way that shut down Jack's tendency to be kind of annoying. Way to go, Sawyer! I like him as the toughest hombre in Dharma-ville, and I like him as the alpha male keeping Jack in line.
- The romance stuff, which can be heavy-handed and migraine-inducing on this show, was subtly handled. Through looks alone, Sawyer, Kate, Juliet and Jack acknowledge the rich brew of unacknowledged feelings and resurfacing longings. As I've said in the past, I think Sawyer's tender love for Kate is far more interesting than Kate and Sawyer together, which doesn't really do much for me (Jack and Kate together does even less for me).
- But as others have been saying, Juliet and Sawyer have really wonderful chemistry together -- two lost, guarded souls who found refuge in each other. I'd much, much rather see them stay together than for the show's writers to peel them apart in order to keep various permutations of the love quandrangle going. I can see spicing up Sawyer-Juliet with complications. But if there's a long round of aggravating breakups and makeups just to "add romance" to the show, I'm going to get cranky (then again, this season the show has really turned on the afterburners. I have the sense that they're not going to waste time with an overabundance of pointless romance melodrama).
I'm liking Patrick Fischler as Phil. He sure seems friendly, but as we saw when he confronted Kate, he can turn paranoid and intimidating on a dime. - I loved the moment when Sun whacked Ben with the paddle. He's had that coming for a while.
- Young Ben seems suitably creepy. So are we to understand that Ben has known all these characters for far longer than he's ever let on? I guess so.
- Talking of creepy, so the sweet Amy had a baby named... Ethan, a.k.a. Mr FreakyPants. It's weird thinking that such a sweet innocent babe will end up being such a malevolent or at the very least strange guy, but that appears to be the case.
- You know I'm a sucker for Dharma Initiative stuff, so to see Pierre Chang processing an intake group was fun (and I'm such a Dharma-phile that I recognized the brief footage in the training video of a man riding a bike as being from a past Dharma clip I saw at Comic-Con, I forget when).
- I also like that we saw more of Frank Lapidus. This episode had so many elements that I generally like -- Lapidus, the D.I., Chang, Sawyer in full wisecrack mode, Hurley in a D.I. jumpsuit for goodness sake -- that even though it wasn't a major episode in any way, it still passed by quickly and enjoyably.
Did you see what the other screens in Radzinsky's station were playing? I couldn't quite make out all the screens, but one of them had an image of Kermit the Frog.- The group photo here is from an array of promo photos ABC released today. I'm no photo expert, but this group picture seems to be, well, weird. It looks very obviously to me like a bunch of separate shots that were Photoshopped together and the lighting seems off. Ah well, never mind. I prefer the shot of Sun about to whack Ben in the head. You can't really improve on that.
Share your thoughts on "Namaste" below, if you care to.
