ABC/ MARIO PEREZ
SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t want me to ruin last night’s Lost for you, have your evil father give you $100,000 to give me in a paper bag. Or, just watch the episode before reading further.
It’s true what they say: an island vacation can do wonders for your health. If Locke getting up and walking again didn’t already convince you, who should come sauntering out of the jungle but Mikhail Bakunin, who was apparently not killed quite dead by that sonic blast from the defense perimeter. (Or maybe he was, which would lend some credibility to the Zombie Island theory of Lost.)
You could say the healing powers of the island are awfully convenient for Lost’s writers, for which it provides a handy explanation for the usual acceleration of TV time, so that Sawyer could get over an infected gunshot wound in a relative jiffy and now the parachutist can be up an around in a day or so. But you can’t say they didn’t set up this aspect up in advance, between the healings of Locke and Rose and Jin’s island-induced gift of supersperm. It does raise questions about who the island does and doesn’t heal, and why, though. Its curative powers didn’t save Boone or Libby, for instance, nor the marshal who was hauling Kate in on Flight 815. It may have something to do with that whole Good Person / Bad Person dynamic that has Ben so exercised. Or maybe the island just has a supernatural understanding of which characters are expendable.
Other questions/comments:
* OK, Portuguese–or whatever-the-hell-she-was-speaking–speakers: what did the parachutist really say when Mikhail claimed she was thanking him?
* Was Charlie protesting a bit too much when he insisted that the expedition party kill or capture Mikhail? As a shout-out to one of our regular commenters, I can’t help now but see everything Charlie does through Chaddogg’s Charlie-is-an-Other theory (which, by the way, Mrs. Tuned In is convinced is right as well).
* I could take or leave Sun’s flashback. I liked how it showed, as her earlier one this season did, that she is tougher than she lets on. But for exactly that reason I thought she would have been skeptical enough not to let a little OB-GYN bonding with Juliet clear the Other of suspicion–I was expecting Sun to sneak behind Juliet into the hatch at the end of the episode to see what she was up to.
* On the other hand, the abandoned hatch nursery from Claire’s flashback–no less creepy this time around.
Anyway, am looking forward to next week’s return of Locke, fresh from blowing up the sub and absconding with the Others. And Jack thinks he has trust problems right now…