Lost season 5 episode 8 review

Our second take on the latest episode of Lost, and Sawyer takes centre stage...

I’m starting to think that all of the negative reviews and comments about their show was getting to the writers.

I think that they may have realised the barely tolerable nature of a few of this season’s episodes, and decided that, prior to taking a week off, they’d share the love.

Don’t get me wrong, there were many aspects of this week’s show that I loved. It was pretty much Sawyer-centric, I realised that the bad guy from The Green Mile is in charge of the Dharmas and is therefore going to die, and the opening salvo itself harked back to earlier series by giving us all the most unpredictable of reveals regarding Jim Lafleur.

Am I imagining this, or wasn’t that the name on one of the dead Dharma guys that’s already been found? I’ve searched online, but the only list of Dharma members I can find is at Lostpedia, and that (obviously) shows Sawyer as being very much alive, along with Juliet, Miles and Jin.

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Which leads us to the question – where is Daniel? Aside from seeing him sobbing at the sight of a young ginger girl skipping, he was conspicuous by his absence throughout the remainder of the show.

Speaking of missing islanders, has anyone seen Sun or Sayid? We know that Linus is around, and can presume that Locke is about to exact some revenge on him, but two of the Oceanic six remain completely unaccounted for.

Anyway, back to the Juliet-Sawyer love-in.

Ok, so I bought it. I get the whole opposites attract thing (especially being that my fiancée is beautiful, intelligent and flexible in her opinions of Matthew Fox), and the on-screen chemistry was certainly better between those two than Sawyer and Kate, Jack and Kate or Jack and Juliet.

However, despite the fact that this series of Lost finally has me convinced that it’s going somewhere, and that it ticked enough of the right boxes in terms of reveals, insightful jumps back and forwards and a little bit of suspense, I did kind of feel like I just watched a Hugh Grant film, I mean, it’s classic.

Boy meets girl on plane, plane crashes, boy loses girl to other boy on island, bad stuff happens on island, boy, other boy and girl leave island in helicopter – only boy leaves helicopter to save other boy and girl, boy returns to island and falls in love with other girl, original girl and other boy return to island… It’s a charming English accent and floppy hair away from being re-cut by Richard Curtis. And now, on the cliffhanger of Sawyer seeing Kate, and (aside from college basketball’s tournament, which the networks pump millions into) we have to wait thirteen more days to find out that Sawyer still has a thing for Freckles. Shucks.

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Okay, so aside from feeling like I just saw a chick flick, I did enjoy Lost this past week; it was a solid ‘filler’ episode to bridge the gaps between the Oceanic Six arriving back and what went on with the remaining Losties. I’m not that keen on the three year jumps backwards and forwards as a means to tell a story, although having already done it with the Oceanic Six, I can understand why it’s been done to show the parallel timelines between the two groups.

A few random thoughts, though, that I’m wondering, and will probably think about far too much for the next 13 days, is how the Oceanic Six will be bedded in now. I mean, Lafleur can hardly go and tell the Dharma people that he’s just found the rest of his crew, now can he? I think it’ll be interesting to see Jack’s (many) reactions to seeing another corpse come to life when he presumably meets Locke again. Can anyone else see this ending in some sort of a Quantum Leap fashion, with everything resolving neatly and the Losties being returned to their time? I know that was a horrible seed to plant, and hope endlessly that it won’t happen, but am already afraid that it will. After all, JJ Abrams has been working on people de- and re-materialising on Star Trek for quite some time!

I’m also intrigued by the title of the next episode, and quite what it means – Namaste – which is a Sanskrit greeting meaning (in its most literal form) “I bow to you” – could this be another Locke-centric episode where we see him emerge as a leader for one of the numerous factions calling the island home right now? Until March 22nd, who knows?

Den Of Geek List of Lost