Season
3, Episodes 17 and 18- “Catch-22” and “D.O.C.”
Summary:
We
see Desmond’s time as a monk at a monastery after he broke up with his fiancé. After
leaving because he wasn’t right for it, he meets Penny Widmore. Jack, Sawyer,
Kate, and Juliet are angsty about their love-square and engage in a game of
ping pong. Desmond receives another premonition of a parachutist (with a
connection to Penny) landing on the island, but sees Charlie die in the search.
Despite this, he recruits Charlie, Hurley, and Jin to find her. They hear a
helicopter crash and see a parachutist fall into the jungle and chase after it.
When Charlie is about to be killed, Desmond saves him. They find the
parachutist alive, but instead of Penny it’s an unknown woman who mutters,
“Desmond…”
In
flashback, a woman threatens Sun with revealing the status of Jin’s parents
unless she gets paid. Sun visits Mr. Kwon, who insists she protect Jin from
their family shame. She asks her father for the money but he demands Jin work
security for him as a debt. She ends up paying the woman, who is Jin’s mother. The
parachutist is injured and talking in foreign languages. Mikhail stumbles upon
them and is forced by the group to save her, but is freed at the end. The woman
tells Hurley they found the wreckage of Flight 815 and that there were no
survivors. Juliet reveals to Sun that pregnant women die on the island. She
takes her to the Staff where they determine the baby was conceived on the
island, but that she is in danger of dying. Juliet divulges this info to Ben in
a secret tape recorder but quietly says, “I hate you” after recording.
Review:
“Catch-22” is pretty underrated, and I
like it a lot. It’s officially the start of the freighter phase of the show,
and after such a long time without new blood being added to the island it’s a
little jarring to see someone just drop in like that. This is like Tricia
Tanaka 2.0 with the funny gang teaming up for an adventure, except it needs
more Sawyer and Vincent. The campfire/ghost story is a nice bit of pure comedy.
But more importantly, this episode helps explain how Desmond’s flashes work,
and seems to suggest that by saving Charlie he is altering the timeline –
namely, that Penny as the parachutist is replaced with Naomi. Do we know for
sure if it was going to be Penny if Charlie had died? No idea. But Des places
Charlie’s life above reuniting with his love, and that’s a big step in his
redemption story. We should have seen a vision of Penny in the suit to prove that saving Charlie actually changed the future.
The ping-pong match works because the
A-story is a bit lighter (sure, Charlie is mortal danger, but they never played
it off as something that would seriously happen right now). It’s framed in the
context of the Love Quadrangle, which is not really my bag, but doesn’t weigh
the whole thing down. The flashback is also nothing special. “Catch-22” does do
a little track-laying, as it reintroduces the beach cable (after 2+ seasons of
never being mentioned) in time for it to come into play in the finale, and
allows Desmond and Charlie to know where it is for their mission. Despite the
life-and-death stakes for Charlie, this is another fun outing before things get
real serious.
Speaking of underrated, I liked “D.O.C.”
more than I remembered. The flashback is actually pretty good, and Sun is
revealed as the catalyst for Jin’s servitude to Paik Industries. She puts her
husband into her father’s service in order to prevent shame (more to her own
family than to Jin), but ends up shaming him even more because of what he is
forced to do there. “We are the cause of our own suffering,” says the Room 23
video earlier in the season, and Sun is a great example of this. It’s always
nice to see Mr. Kwon, and we learn that Jin may not even be his son, which is a
parallel to the currently-unnamed baby who may or may not be the offspring of
Jae Lee. Speaking of which…it seems pretty absurd that Sun could be pregnant
with Jae’s baby. It’s been way too long since she last slept with him, and the
conception date with Jin is too far after the crash for there to even be an
overlap period. Perhaps Sun is just lying to Juliet to stave off the feeling of
impending doom.
Sun’s and Naomi’s lives are both on the
line in two different ways, but at different accelerations. Naomi’ miraculous
wound-healing ties together with Jin’s increased sperm count, and both women
are cared for by the “enemy” Others, although Juliet’s silent protest at the
end returns her to that ambiguous middle. The flip comes so soon after “One of
Us” that it’s starting to feel a little gimmicky. And since we’re on the
subject of gimmicks, Naomi’s comment about everyone being dead was again a
faux-twist for the sake of having a twist, but with so much theorizing that the
show was about dead people all along, I kinda hate that they toyed with it.
Naomi is clearly more of a plot device than a character, meant to jump-start
the freighter story, and she never really feels like an actual piece to this
grand puzzle. Maybe a flashback story would have worked, and I don’t include
that brief one in “Confirmed Dead”.
Connecting the Dots:
Brother Campbell has a picture of him
and Ms. Hawking on his desk. He is never seen outside this episode, but it’s
possible that given her connection to the Lamp Post church, they may have run
in similar circles.
Mr. Paik makes a reference to the Hanso
Foundation in conversation with an employee. We knew this from The Lost
Experience, though the connection between the two entities does not really come
to the forefront of the story.
Mikhail says “wounds heal faster here”,
although it still remains to be seen why some illnesses heal and others (like
Ben’s tumor) don’t.
Naomi’s “No survivors” comment is
because they found the fake plane wreckage with graveyard corpses inside.
Ranking:
1.
Tricia Tanaka is
Dead (9/10)
2.
The Cost of
Living (8.5/10)
3.
Flashes Before
Your Eyes (8.5/10)
4.
Exposé (8.5/10)
5.
Catch-22 (8.5/10)
(Another fun episode, with an interesting look into how Desmond’s premonitions
operate.)
6.
Enter 77 (8/10)
7.
D.O.C. (8/10) (A
rare season 3 flashback that actually works. The two stories of trying to save
the lives of two women complement each other well.)
8.
One of Us (8/10)
9.
The Man from
Tallahassee (8/10)
10. Par Avion (7.5/10)
11. Not in Portland (7/10)
12. Left Behind (7/10)
13. Further Instructions (7/10)
14. The Glass Ballerina (7/10)
15. Every Man for Himself (6.5/10)
16. A Tale of Two Cities (6.5/10)
17. Stranger in a Strange Land (4.5/10)
18. I Do (4/10)
Next time: Cooper is all tied up, and Ben and Locke go on a weekend holiday to a nice cabin in the woods.
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