Season
4, Episode 13- “There’s No Place Like Home, part 2”
Summary:
Keamy
takes Ben back to the chopper, where Kate, Sayid, and the Others take out all
of the mercenaries. Jack and Sawyer link up with Hurley and Locke at the
Orchid. Locke tries to persuade Jack to stay, but they are interrupted by Ben
who takes Locke into the Orchid. Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Sayid, and Frank
all reconvene at the chopper and they take off. They notice a fuel leak from
the firefight and begin tossing items out, and eventually Sawyer jumps,
swimming back to shore. Miles hints to Charlotte that he knows her personal
connection to the island, and she decides not to go on the raft. Ben plays the
orientation film for Locke, which describes the exotic matter near the station
that they use to shift subjects in time. Ben starts to load the vault with
metal objects, but Keamy arrives, saying he has a heart monitor hooked up to a
bomb on the boat. Ben kills him anyway.
Desmond
determines that Keamy’s bomb cannot be diffused. Michael uses liquid nitrogen
to freeze the battery and slow down its detonation response. The light goes red
just as the chopper lands. They patch up the hole, refuel, and take off again,
but Jin is left behind. As Michael’s nitrogen runs out, the bomb explodes,
destroying the freighter. Ben blows open the Orchid vault and tells Locke to
meet up with Richard, as he climbs down into the freezing wheel room next to
the pocket of energy. He turns the wheel and the island is engulfed in a bright
light and vanishes with everyone on it. With no place to land, the chopper runs
out of fuel and crashes into the ocean, leaving them only a life raft to survive
on.
They
are picked up by Penny’s boat. They concoct a plan to lie to the public and the
Oceanic Six set off on a raft to be found by the residents of Sumba. In
flash-forwards, Walt visits Hurley in the ward to say that “Jeremy Bentham”
came to see him and Hurley says they are lying to protect everyone who they
left behind. Sayid arrives to break him out. Sun confronts Widmore about a
possible partnership. Kate has a dream about Claire warning not to bring Aaron
back. Jack returns to the funeral parlor where “Jeremy Bentham” is laid, and
encounters Ben who urges him to bring everyone back to the island. That
includes the deceased, which is revealed to be Locke.
Review:
It’s twistedly brilliant to begin right
at the moment of “We have to go back!” from a year ago. It does seem a little
forced that Kate would stop the car and hop out to tell him about “Bentham” (do
they really need to use his pseudonym when they’re speaking privately?). We
check in with each of our rescued heroes, and find that the specter of the
island is still clawing at them in some way. By the end, they have arrived at
civilization and our two timeframes finally link up. The flash-forward
experiment was fun, but ended right around at the perfect time before the
pieces started getting too hard to track.
We arrive at a dramatic dilemma: the
helicopter people need to land on the freighter because they need to refuel,
but everyone needs to get off the freighter because it’s about to explode. Meanwhile,
you have people being ferried there from the dinghy, unknowingly fleeing being
sucked into a time-skipping nightmare. They do a masterful job of wringing
tension out of those scenes, and giving off a feeling of unstoppable doom, with
the characters getting squeezed between crises. After the freighter’s
explosion, Sun lets out a series of screams which I imagine just had to have
put Yunjin Kim’s voice out of commission for a few days. Kim rarely gets to
display a full acting range but this was a series highlight, as I actually
believed this was a woman who just saw her husband blown up. The end to
Michael’s story is a little unceremonious, especially given his long absence,
but it jives with his attempt to making up for the murders he committed. Also,
pour one out for any redshirts who survived the explosion only to find that the
island has vanished, and they barely missed out on getting rescued by Penny.
Something clever happens here – whether
or not it was intentional. The audience is now at risk of being turned off by
the disappearing island (by far the most bonkers thing that has happened to
this point, and it would not be surprising if a few viewers to decide to tap
out), but there’s actually very little time to ponder it, because now our
heroes in the helicopter are out of fuel and are about to crash in the middle
of the ocean. In getting us to set aside the island for the rest of the episode,
we are sucked back into the real reason we watch this show: the characters.
There is some great sound effect/mixing here, between the dying machinery, the
whoosh of air as the rotors take their final swings, and the piercing, croaking
crunch of metal slamming into ocean. While we know that most of the characters
will be safe, the fates of Frank and Desmond are up in the air, thus giving it
some dramatic weight. The reunion with Penny was well-timed, and as satisfying
as were hoping for. Without “The Constant” would we have cared as much?
The final reveal of Locke in the coffin
is maybe the weakest ending to a season, as it doesn’t reshape the basic
structure of the show (like showing Penny and “the outside world,” or
introducing the flash-forwards) or provide a big cliffhanger (opening the hatch
or blowing up the bomb). It’s a sort of cliffhanger in that a main character is
dead, but it’s clearly setting up a future moment, not promising to resolve one
within minutes of the show returning. But it doesn’t matter since everything
that came before it is majestic, and the island disappearing is a game-changer
by itself.
Connecting the Dots:
Charlotte implies to Miles that she was
on the island before – which she was, as a child in DHARMA. Little does Miles
know that he, too, once called the island “home.”
Sawyer whispers to Kate to take care of
his daughter, Clementine. But now that I think about it, he doesn’t know the
freighter is going to explode or that the island will disappear. Both of them
should currently be under the impression that everyone is still going to get
ferried to the boat and leave.
Christian appears on the freighter to
tell Michael he can “go.” The whispers accompany him. If this was Smokey, how
could he have gotten there, and how could he have then gotten back, especially
since he doesn’t work on water? If it’s actually ghost Christian, why did he
appear to Michael of all people, and why hasn’t he shown up anywhere else? I
feel like the ghost is more probable, since there is just no way Smokey could
be there.
Ranking:
1.
There’s No Place
Like Home, part 2 (10/10) (Amazing job at pinning the characters between multiple
bad options – the boat, the chopper, and the island. Great action sequences,
pulse-pounding twists, and several long-awaited emotional beats.)
2.
The Constant
(10/10)
3.
Cabin Fever
(9/10)
4.
Confirmed Dead
(9/10)
5.
The Shape of
Things to Come (8.5/10)
6.
The Beginning of
the End (8.5/10)
7.
There’s No Place
Like Home, part 1 (8/10)
8.
Meet Kevin
Johnson (7.5/10)
9.
The Economist
(7.5/10)
10. Something Nice Back Home (6.5/10)
11. Ji Yeon (6.5/10)
12. The Other Woman (5.5/10)
13. Eggtown (5/10)
Season 4 average: 7.808
Full Ranking of Seasons 3 and 4:
1.
There’s No Place
Like Home, part 2 (10/10)
2.
The Constant
(10/10)
3.
The Man Behind
the Curtain (10/10)
4.
Through the
Looking Glass (9.5/10)
5.
The Brig (9/10)
6.
Tricia Tanaka is
Dead (9/10)
7.
Cabin Fever
(9/10)
8.
Confirmed Dead
(9/10)
9.
The Cost of
Living (8.5/10)
10. Flashes Before Your Eyes (8.5/10)
11. Exposé (8.5/10)
12. The Shape of Things to Come (8.5/10)
13. Catch-22 (8.5/10)
14. The Beginning of the End (8.5/10)
15. Greatest Hits (8/10)
16. Enter 77 (8/10)
17. D.O.C. (8/10)
18. One of Us (8/10)
19. The Man from Tallahassee (8/10)
20. There’s No Place Like Home, part 1 (8/10)
21. Meet Kevin Johnson (7.5/10)
22. The Economist (7.5/10)
23. Par Avion (7.5/10)
24. Not in Portland (7/10)
25. Left Behind (7/10)
26. Further Instructions (7/10)
27. The Glass Ballerina (7/10)
28. Something Nice Back Home (6.5/10)
29. Ji Yeon (6.5/10)
30. Every Man for Himself (6.5/10)
31. A Tale of Two Cities (6.5/10)
32. The Other Woman (5.5/10)
33. Eggtown (5/10)
34. Stranger in a Strange Land (4.5/10)
35. I Do (4/10)
No comments:
Post a Comment