the awesome/terrifying freedom

written by: edward kitsis & adam horowitz. this duo has written some great episodes including my favorite of the much maligned 6 episode 'mini-season:' sawyer's fake heart-bomb story in 'every man for himself.' they also wrote the nikki/paolo 'exposé,' which i felt was successful, though it sparked more debate than any other episode this year.

directed by: fred toye, his first episode of lost! i'd say he nailed it. he comes from the j.j. abrams stable, having produced and directed many episodes of 'alias.'

we are heading towards the climax moment, and if the quality of the episodes continues to climb, the catharsis will probably make my head explode.

the ratings for lost have been climbing as the doubters come back to the show. doubters who will realize that the show -does- indeed have a plan, and who will have to either download the episodes they missed, or buy them on dvd, which should only help restore the network's faith in the show. even if the numbers for ad revenue go down, they're still making a fortune on dvd sales, right?

i'm happy that my faith is paying off. these last few episodes have been phenomenal, and perhaps now people are seeing that we needed the expository opening act of the season in order for the latter half to work as well as it has been.

on to business:

naomi.

who is she?

let's look at the evidence in favor of her being affiliated with mittelos bioscience/widmore/the other's on-shore enterprise:

• cycled through several languages before finding one that only she and mikhail could speak.
• had a blinking beacon very similar to the one on the food drop
• told mikhail 'i'm not alone' in portuguese.
• was perhaps no coincidence that she landed near the cable controlling the submarine beacon.

let's look at the evidence in favor of her being hired by penny:

• photo of desnelope
• portuguese copy of catch-22, reinforcing connection to portuguese artic crew working for penny.
  
• said 'i am not alone' in portuguese, after she had made the connection with mikhail in italian, so maybe she was just deslusional from the pain and didn't have some weird motive.
  

we just don't know enough to make any good inference at this point. ryan is completely certain that she's working for charles widmore. at this point i'm leaning towards her not being affiliated with the others/widmore. if she's with the others, she would know good and well where flight 815 actually crashed, and would probably be as well briefed on the flight dossier as the rest of the tribe. it doesn't make sense for her to 'act surprised' and then drop a crazy potentially alternate universe revealing bomb as a lie devised by the others.

naomi is there for something else, possibly desmond, and probably hired by penny, but paid for by penny's dad, charles widmore, whose company is affiliated with dharma, which is maybe why she's got a matching beacon. so she comes with a connection to the others, but isn't actually one of them.

we'll know soon.

sun.

this story was just beautiful. the acting was great, the stakes were simple and clear, and the writing was strong enough to give us a flashback serving an emotional purpose rather than a mythlogical one. elizabeth mitchell. what a coup in casting her. she finds a way to make neutrality compelling. her scene with yunjin kim was heartbreaking. it's so rare to see a scene constructed around simultaneous joy and dread, and here we see it clearly in both actresses. everyone involved has got to be damn proud of that scene.

this episode is the payoff of over a year of buildup. let's look back at how carefully constructed this was.

• season 2, episode 5: jae, the potential other father of sun's baby, was introduced as a suitor to sun before she ever met jin.
• season 2, episode 16: we learn that sun has been learning english from jae, we see that there is tension between them, but we do not know if they've 'done the deed.' when we learn that jin is infertile and yet sun is pregnant, we infer that she did indeed have an affair with jae, though we never see it. a pretty blah ep that seemed to have no greater consequence.
  
• season 3, episode 2: jae and sun's affair is discovered by her father, which leads to jae's suicide. jin is unaware of the affair.
  

and then this week's ep, whose suspense is drawn from the entire sun/jin story coupled with the grander pregnancy-peril arc that has been in play since claire was taken in season 1, episode 10. like locke being pushed out the window, this episode has been a long time in the making. but unlike locke, the true weight of this mystery wasn't revealed until juliet's flashback.

which means the writers are giving us many pieces of information that may seem inconsequential, but are actually building on greater mysteries and reveals yet to come.

so i'm going to hold out for a while before i make any further judgements on my least favorite episode so far this season: jack's tattoo episode, which seemed to go nowhere, with a flashback that didn't add much more to the story than incorrectly translated characters on his arm. the finale is going to answer big questions about jack - what happened to him during that week with the others, and probably tell us the missing second half of his story in thailand.

i'm guessing it's also going to be a game-changer, which is why i'm certain that jack is holding on to crucial information, just waiting for his moment to exploit it.

'no survivors'



of course the big kicker was naomi's last sentence. thankfully, she didn'tdie right after saying it, so we'll hopefully get a little more info out of her before she starts screaming in russian for mikhail to shoot her or something. but let's look at some possibilities:

• the survivors crossed over to an alternate universe. in the 'real world,' the plane really did crash.
• widmore/mittelos/dharma has enough money and influence to stage a wreck to protect the secret of the island.

i'm gonna go with #2. if we were still in season 1, the first option would be very probable, but since the final scene of season 2, we've now seen several instances of crossing back and forth to and from the island. i don't think they're in another dimension. however, it is still possible that the timeline moves differently on the island, and this may have been a factor in widmore/dharma/the other's ability to stage a wreck.

ah but here's another possibility:

naomi is from an alternate future in which desmond stayed at his post and continued pushing the button. it turns out the plane was going to crash anyway, but unaffected by the magnetic anamoly, it ends up nowhere near the island. in this alternate future, penelope is still looking for desmond, and sends naomi.

last week it was the badly photoshopped monk pic. here is my

minor gripe of the week:

juliet stops the recorder and says to ben, 'i hate you.' it's just too obvious, too on the nose. i mean, maybe on heroes, but not on lost. mitchell could easily have said the same thing with only her face. close her eyes for a second, show some doubt in what she's doing, then put the recorder back.