Season
3, Episodes 21 and 22- “Greatest Hits” and “Through the Looking Glass”
Summary:
Charlie
writes a note about the greatest moments of his life to give to Claire: hearing
Driveshaft on the radio for the first time, learning to swim, receiving the
family ring, saving a woman being mugged (Nadia Jazeem), and the night he met
Claire. Ben returns to the Others to say they are conducting the raid a night
earlier, and Alex finds Karl and tells him to warn the camp. Jack leads some of
the group to a clearing where Danielle appears and demonstrates a dynamite
explosion. Jack tells them they’re going to put explosives in the tents for
when the Others arrive. Juliet reveals the underwater Looking Glass station is
jamming signals. Desmond tells Charlie he saw a flash of Claire escaping the
island, but Charlie must drown for it to happen. To turn off the Looking Glass,
it will likely be a suicide mission and Charlie volunteers. Karl arrives to
tell them that the attack is happening a day earlier. They don’t have enough
wire yet to rig the explosives, so Sayid, Jin, and Bernard volunteer to stay
behind and shoot the dynamite. Charlie says goodbye to Claire, and he and
Desmond head to the Looking Glass. Charlie gives him his note for Claire but
Desmond wants to do the mission instead. Charlie knocks him unconscious and
swims down to the station where he finds two gun-toting women.
The
camp heads off to the radio tower for safety. Charlie has been tied up by
Bonnie and Greta. They inform Ben and he sends Mikhail to deal with it. The
three shooters attack the raid team but are still captured by a remaining few,
and Bernard gives away their plan. The main group is worried about only two
explosions, so Sawyer, Juliet, and Hurley head back to help. Ben takes Alex to
intervene with the castaways. Ben tells Jack that Naomi is part of a group that
will bring destruction to the island. Alex finally reunites with Danielle. Locke
is still alive after being shot, and prepares to kill himself but a vision of
Walt appears telling him he has work to do.
Sawyer,
Juliet, and Hurley kill Tom and his team at the beach. Desmond wakes up and is
shot at by Mikhail so he dives down to the Looking Glass. Mikhail follows him
and is told by Ben to kill everyone down there. He kills Greta and fatally injuries
Bonnie before Desmond takes him out with a harpoon. Charlie convinces Bonnie to
give him the code to turn off the jammer. He receives a transmission from Penny
who does not know anything about Naomi or a boat. Mikhail has found his way
into the water outside and blows a hole through the window with a grenade.
Charlie closes and locks the door to the transmission room and writes “NOT
PENNY’S BOAT” on his hand to warn Desmond, and then succumbs to the water.
Danielle’s transmission is turned off at the radio tower and Naomi begins to
signal her freighter. Locke appears and throws a knife into her back, but Jack
picks up a call from the freighter who says they are coming to help. In what
will be revealed as a flash-forward, a bearded and depressed Jack is acting
reckless, messing up at work, and troubled by a funeral notice in the paper. He
meets Kate at the airport and begs her, “We have to go back!”
Review:
Having Karl warn the Losties about the
pushed-up timetable before flashing back to show Ben give the order is a very
odd use of the chronology. It’s meant to be a big note to head to commercial
on, but going back in the same episode to show the first half of it exposes how
weird it is. I think they would have been perfectly justified just starting
with the Ben and Alex scene, and have the audience freak out while Jack and the
others prepare for an attack that they don’t know is coming. But regardless,
the new timetable serves its purpose: if the attack proceeds as scheduled, they
would have time to wire up the dynamite and have the upper hand without anyone
getting in danger. The sudden emergency forces three characters into danger as
they have to stay behind. It also prevents any sort of better plan with the
Looking Glass.
The writers need Desmond to stay there
so he can go down and help Charlie. There is no point in him willingly being
there, so they need him to be unconscious. The only way he can be unconscious
is by Charlie’s hand. Charlie would only knock him out if he was interfering
with Charlie’s fate, which seems unlikely given his acceptance of how his
powers work. It’s clunky, but it had to be done. I also find it amusing that
the only people who Jack brought to the dynamite testing (and really, why did
they have to waste perfectly good dynamite on a random tree?) was the main
characters. It’s as if he said, “Alright, anyone who has ever had a flashback,
please follow me!”
Charlie’s flashback story is
unconventional, but that allows it to jump around and make some interesting
points instead of forcing a drawn-out boring story. I’d say my favorite is
hearing their song on the radio. We don’t know that this note is for Claire
until he writes “The night I met you”, which is a sugary sweet reveal. It’s
really too bad that she never got the note. It’s kinda like Sayid’s rejections
of torture that he eventually goes back on; these great flashback stories are
made for character development in their respective episodes but are then mostly
forgotten afterwards. Still, this is a nice send-off party for Charlie, who had
to do a lot of work to get back into our good graces after his season 2
meltdown. The stage is set for the explosive finale, and a final wrinkle is
thrown in with Bonnie and Greta in the Looking Glass. Normally I don’t like to
interrupt big emotional moments for an arbitrary twist, but this one is
acceptable.
This might be controversial, but I think
“Through the Looking Glass” might be the least best of the six finales. It’s
close, but I think that’s how it shakes out. Not for a lack of effort though.
The shootout and explosions at the beach are a great set-piece, and Hurley and
Sayid get two of the better kills in the show (bus, and neck snap). I think
where this part whiffs is when Ben orders the executions and you just hear the
shots over the radio. There’s no way anyone with half a brain could have
seriously thought they died. I’d have preferred that they immediately showed
Tom shooting into the ground instead of waiting to reveal it.
The radio tower contingent does not have
as much going on, besides a Ben beat-down and a Rousseau reunion that is tame,
given how long it’s been set up for. I love Locke, so with this being the
finale he appears the least in, I’m a little bummed. Even his sudden appearance
to knife Naomi isn’t as great as it could be because (1) she’s barely a
character, and (2) Jack picks up the radio anyway. So he really doesn’t end up
doing that much. On the other side, it’s neat that they actually included the
radio tower and turned off Danielle’s message after all those years. The tower
never really comes into play again but that’s a nice little footnote to what we
saw way back in the pilot.
Charlie’s adventure in the Looking Glass
is interesting, as his main adversaries are brand new characters, thinly drawn,
and easily-dispatched. Mikhail is the true villain here, and his
invulnerability reaches absurd levels, what with the spear through his chest,
and his quiet retreat into the water to blow open the porthole. I find the fact
that Charlie needs to play a song as a code (and that he just so happens to be
a musician) a little cheesy. His death has continued to raise questions about
why he felt he had to lock himself in the transmission room. His determination
to keep Desmond’s timeline intact is a selfless act, but also one built
entirely on faith – not only faith in the timeline playing out accordingly, but
faith in Desmond telling the truth in the first place. Given Charlie’s
backstory of faith (he makes the sign of the cross as he dies), this fits
nicely.
If there’s one main thing that keeps
this down as the least-best finale, it would be the flash-forwards. We all
remember the crazy twist, and what a twist it was. But the thing is…they’re not
that interesting otherwise. Jack is a hot mess, but that’s about it. At least
the others feature multiple characters, or has Desmond’s big backstory reveal.
The only real thing of interest here is the coffin, which is like a smaller
version of “What’s in the hatch?” This at least is a good setup for a mystery;
not that it’s hard to do. A coffin (especially one that we know is currently
occupied) is inherently intriguing. Because we don’t know until the end that
this is a flash-forward, the coffin mystery comes upon us quietly. When we
think it’s a flashback, we’re curious but we don’t think it could be anyone
that we know, because everyone else important in Jack’s life is accounted for (well,
except Achara, but fuck you if you seriously thought Achara was in the coffin).
It’s not until the episode is over that we think back and realize that the dead
person is probably one of our main characters.
Connecting the Dots:
Desmond claims he had a vision of Claire
taking her baby onto a helicopter in getting of the island, which would only
happen if Charlie died. This image never occurred. So what happened? Option 1
is that Desmond lied in order to get Charlie to do his duty. We never see him get
this flash, so it’s feasible he made it up. Option 2 is that he did indeed see
Claire on the chopper, but that something altered the future, making it change.
Sun gets on the chopper with Aaron. Or alternatively, Claire gets on Ajira in
the finale. Just like how Penny was swapped with Naomi as the parachutist,
perhaps Claire was swapped with Sun as the holder of Aaron getting onto the
helicopter.
Walt’s appearance has little
explanation. It supports the idea of astral projection, but is not so neatly
tethered to my magnetism idea. It’s still possible that it was the
hallucination of a starving and bleeding Locke. But Walt’s later revelation
that he saw people standing over Locke in his dreams suggests there might be
some actual phenomena going on here.
Ranking:
1.
The Man Behind
the Curtain (10/10)
2.
Through the
Looking Glass (9.5/10) (The final reveal smashed our whole framework for the
show, though the flash-forwards leading up to it are a bit of a drag. Still,
there’s action, reunions, intrigue, and death all throughout this exciting
finale.)
3.
The Brig (9/10)
4.
Tricia Tanaka is
Dead (9/10)
5.
The Cost of
Living (8.5/10)
6.
Flashes Before
Your Eyes (8.5/10)
7.
Exposé (8.5/10)
8.
Catch-22 (8.5/10)
9.
Greatest Hits
(8/10) (Despite some weird writing choices, an emotional sendoff to Charlie
helps layer a great setup for the finale.)
10. Enter 77 (8/10)
11. D.O.C. (8/10)
12. One of Us (8/10)
13. The Man from Tallahassee (8/10)
14. Par Avion (7.5/10)
15. Not in Portland (7/10)
16. Left Behind (7/10)
17. Further Instructions (7/10)
18. The Glass Ballerina (7/10)
19. Every Man for Himself (6.5/10)
20. A Tale of Two Cities (6.5/10)
21. Stranger in a Strange Land (4.5/10)
22. I Do (4/10)
Season 3 Average: 7.659
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