Love Story: Lost Recapped

The last episode of LOST, you know, the one with Desmond jockeying through time and consciousness like Billy Pilgrim in a Robert Zemeckis directed adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five, was so dense and ridiculous that I actually had to take a week off from writing anything just to try to get over it. And after all that time off, I still don't know if I even liked the episode.

I think I did. But I can't be sure.

Yes, in the land of nerds that is the internet, it was hailed as one of the best episodes ever. But I don't think that's really accurate. It was good, but just because it was confusing doesn't mean it was awesome. Just because it made me think doesn't mean it was "thought-provoking." It was what it was, another intensely intimate and romantic episode involving our favorite Scotsman and his long-lost love. And though I'm all for time travel, I much prefer Desmond as some modern day Odysseus than as some time traveler. The stuff that makes the Desmond storyline work is the longing and loss. It's not the dime store science-fiction.

Anyway, I bring all this up, because the other problem with the Desmond episodes is the same thing that makes them so enjoyable to me. They work because they're intimate. They barely involve anyone else in the show. And that's why tonight, it took me a little while to get back in the swing of things, with the more traditional Juliet episode that we were given. This was classic LOST storytelling from the previous three seasons--multiple arcs happening at once with flashbacks--and I have to say, after all was said and done, it kind of felt stale.

Filling in the cracks of Juliet's island life, with how she ended up in bed with Goodwin, was completely boring. I love Juliet as a character almost as much as I love Elizabeth Mitchell as an actress. She's complex and smart and pretty and really manipulative. Giving away too much about her character hurts what her character brings to the show. In fact, even more than hurting Juliet, the flashback was detrimental to the show as a whole because it further weakened the spectre that is Benjamin Linus.

I will readily admit that having Ben be this James Bond villain of sorts (see: the Sayid episode), makes him seem less dangerous and more absurd. It was a lot more fun when Ben was this super enigma of passive aggression. But still, I can roll with it, because even if Ben is the all seeing, all knowing Oz, he's still an impressive foe who seems legitimately dangerous.

But tonight. Oof. Things got ugly for my boy. Seriously, when Ben growled that Juliet was "his" and then ran up the hill like some little girl running home to his mother, well a small part of me actually died. Why oh why would LOST turn Ben into some weak, lovelorn fool? I'm all for humanizing the bad guys, but this was just ridiculous.

Also, the Juliet flashbacks managed to completely revise the history of the show.

Hey, let's give Goodwin a wife! Okay, I guess I can buy that.

Goodwin's wife, who we've never seen before, will magically show up in the woods as Juliet's foe! It'll be so scary and cool! Huh. Really? Because it just doesn't make any sense.

How does this sound? Ben will send Goodwin away because he loves Juliet! Um, what? Since when?

That's the other problem with this episode. Too many love triangles! How many are we dealing with at this point? 4? 5? 10? It's just too much. And now we've got Ben-Juliet-Jack?? I just don't care enough about the love lives of these characters to get emotionally involved in whether or not Ben will get Juliet or if Jack will.

This episode was just a little too rickety for my taste. Okay, that's the nice way of saying "I hated it." There wasn't enough of anyone--not enough Jack, not enough Locke, not enough "good" Ben. And though watching Sawyer and Hurley play horseshoes was funny, I'd rather see Sawyer do something else besides play house, make coffee and crack wise with Hurley, like some college aged stoner. We have all these characters, can't we find something for them to do? It's been constant set-up for three straight weeks.

I guess, if anything, this episode will be remembered for the reveal that Charles Widmore is the man who is really looking for Ben and the Island. But didn't we already learn that last week at the auction, when he was buying the Hanso diary from the Black Rock?

Whatever. Seeing Alan Dale in all his Caleb Niccol glory, step out of a limo on Ben's Boston Red Sox tape made me laugh, if only because it looked like O.C. B-roll from the second season. But in the larger scheme of the show, this is an interesting, if not wholly unexpected, development. Widmore is part of the LOST trio of "bad dads" who reign over the show like some awful cloud of sarin gas--Christian Shepherd and Sun's dad being other two. Having him looking for the Island at the very least creates another, worse bad guy for us to root against. However nothing thus far has proved that he'd be anywhere near a worthy adversary for Ben. Even the "Lovestruck Idiot Ben" that we were treated to tonight seems like he would be able to run circles around Charles Widmore.

I think I can say for the first time all year that I actually didn't particularly like an episode of LOST. Sure, it had a few laugh-out-loud moments, like everything that happened between Ben and Locke, which once again showed that they own the best relationship on the show. But overall it just felt like time killer. It just felt like the episode that you burn through on the DVD to get to the infinitely cooler next episode when you find out that Michael, in a twist that everyone has seen coming for weeks, is the Ben's man on the boat!!!!

And make no mistakes, that's who is on the boat. I'd bet a lot on that. The way they set it up tonight, with Ben telling Locke to "sit down," combined with the ABC promo at the end of the show proclaiming that the man on the boat is a person "you never thought you'd see again," all but clinches it. I can't wait to see Harold Perrineau pop up with a new haircut next week just before the trombone crashes into the LOST title card at the end of the episode. It won't be particularly surprising, but it will guarantee to be positively awesome.