Lost

    I judge a Lost episode's greatness based on how much I enjoyed the mythology in the episode. This week, there wasn't much... at least not until the end. I don't have a whole lot to talk about this week because I don't care much about Kate's story and that's about all we got this week. That being said, I did like the episode. Kate's story was well acted and edited. It didn't drag on too long and we now know why she was so torn up when she ended up at Jack's before the Ajira flight. We got to see Cassidy again this episode and the twist to that storyline was that Kate left Aaron with Claire's mom... not a huge shocker and it won't have a big impact on the overall plot.

    He's Our You is the tipping point for the season five story arch. What I mean by that is that we'll see events in the Dharma timeline get out of hand and bring an end to Sawyer and Juliet's 70s house party. The other half of the cast, stuck in present times, has a bit more of a journey ahead of them as Christian Shepherd said in Namaste. The more interesting storyline at the moment is back in 1977 and the pace started picking up at the end of this week's episode with young Ben Linus getting shot in the chest by Sayid.

    Namaste answered a number of minor questions that have popped up this season and has cleared up a few timeline issues. I don't want to call Namaste a 'filler' episode, but that's pretty much what it is. The only major plot development that happened during this episode was Sayid showing up in 1977 and getting captured by Jin near the Flame station. The purpose of this episode was to set up the coming story arch that will take us to the end of the season, eight weeks or so from now. So what'd we learn? Well, we now know that Radzinsky was actually part of Dharma but he wasn't always holed up in the Swan pushing the button and telling bad snowman jokes...

   Lost is off for a week so we won't get any answers for about two weeks. In the meantime I thought I'd speculate a little more on the second half of this season. So far this season the story arc has moved at a pretty frantic pace. I thought it would have taken all season to round up the Oceanic Six and get them back to the island... when it really only took about four episodes. The story is very well laid out but it does seem somewhat rushed. I doubt this will change as we wrap up the fifth season and I think we'll end this season at a point in the storyline that we might not expect. Here are my thoughts...

    It seems almost too obvious now that the Lost island is, in one way or another, the Egyptian underworld. In the latest episode we get two big clues that would point us in this direction. But before I get in to that there were many, many more points that were interesting. This episode quickly puts us into the Dharma storyline as a truce is broken and Sawyer's group is taken into Dharma custody. As with many Lost episodes it starts by putting us in an undisclosed time and place. We learn that it's the mid-seventies and Dharma is in full effect. Horace, who is one of the leaders of Dharma on the island, is drunk and blowing up dynamite out near the sonic fence. It's because of this that we meet LaFleur, the head of Dharma security, who is actually Sawyer...

    This latest episode of Lost was my favorite of the season so far. We learn right off the bat that Locke 'survived' the return to the island... well, not THE island, but the Hydra island from season three. The show open with Caesar (the guy who offered Jack his condolences after checking Locke's casket at the airport - he also sat next to Hurley in first class) and Alana (the Marshall who was escorting Sayid) in an office on near the Hydra station. Alana says that there they found a man standing out in the water after the crash and no one remembered seeing him on the plane. That man, of course, is Locke and he's somehow been brought back from the dead.

    Well, I was right, for the most part at least. The Oceanic Six, except for Aaron, are back on the island and all is right with the world... Except now the island seems to be stuck in the seventies, and Jin is working for Dharma. Or, at least he's driving a van for Dharma and they've trusted him enough to give him a gun and send him out to investigate the appearance of Jack, Kate and Hurley. But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves, much like this episode. Let's take a step back and look at the events that lead up to 316, shall we?

    It didn't seem like a whole lot happened this episode... and let it was full of interesting reveals. Now we know a little more about Rousseau and her crew, we know how Locke got off of the island to visit the Oceanic Six and we know who Faraday's mother is. Oh, and Charlotte died. Not exactly a shock, she'd been in bad shape for a while but it was surprising that she didn't survive one more flash, which would have seemingly been the last (?). I have a few theories about why Charlotte made it until the end of this episode, which I'll gladly detail below...