Season
4, Episodes 9 and 10- “The Shape of Things to Come” and “Something Nice Back
Home”
Summary:
The
body of the freighter’s doctor washes up on shore, but a Morse coded message
from the freighter says the doctor is fine. Faraday admits it was never their
mission to take them off the island, and Jack collapses with an illness. Keamy
gets Alex to turn off the Pylon fence but it sends a code to Ben as a warning.
The group fortifies Ben’s house but the mercenaries attack before they are
finished, killing the unnamed redshirts. They free Miles and he is sent in with
a walkie to communicate. Ben and Keamy have a standoff and when Ben claims Alex
means nothing to him, she is shot in the head. He goes into a secret chamber
and summons the smoke monster to take out the mercenaries. The group flees the
premises, and Locke and Ben force Hurley to help them find Jacob’s cabin. In
flash-forward, Ben wakes up in the Tunisian desert in 2005, and finds Sayid as
he is burying his wife Nadia. He tells him Nadia was killed by Bakir, a Widmore
lackey, and they team up to take him out. Ben visits Widmore in his bedroom and
threatens to kill Penny.
On
the way to the beach, Miles discovers Danielle’s and Karl’s buried corpses
thanks to his powers. While sleeping in the jungle, Claire wakes up to find
Christian holding Aaron, and when Sawyer and Miles wake up she is gone, leaving
Aaron behind. Jin discovers Charlotte knows Korean. Jack has appendicitis and
he is operated on by Juliet. In flash-forward, Jack and Kate are living
together, and he visits Hurley who passes on a message from Charlie saying he’s
not supposed to be raising Aaron. He proposes marriage to Kate, and sees
visions of his father, which prompts him to get medicated. He spirals out of
control and they effectively break up.
Review:
This was the first episode back after a
brief hiatus for the writer’s strike, so it had to really jolt us back into the
rhythm. Mostly, I would say mission accomplished. You can never go wrong with a
Smokey appearance, who charges onto the scene like a speeding locomotive, before
growing into a giant smoke-storm and bossing Keamy’s crew. That he can
apparently be summoned provides yet another piece to his puzzle, although it
doesn’t exactly fit with the whole story we eventually get. But still, this is
the first time where the monster is actually used as a weapon to take out bad
guys, which colors him with a different brush. On the beach, the doctor’s
corpse provides another clue to the time disparity.
The flash-forward fills in a gap with
Sayid’s story, and leaves open another for the finale to fill in, but the only
real notable part is in Widmore’s bedroom. At the time, we thought that the Big
Bad of the show was going to be Widmore, and that the Ben vs. Widmore conflict
was the crux of the whole thing. How wrong we were. It still has some weight to
it, but after the mercenaries are defeated, the threat lays dormant again
mostly until he returns on the sub. One problem I have is that Ben says Widmore
changed the rules; I don’t know if that means killing their family, or just
killing innocent people altogether. Ben should know that Widmore has no problem
killing random people, as that was the whole point of the fake bomb on the
freighter (unless it was a trick for Michael…oh Ben, you rascal). So if it’s a
“no family” rule…well, why? I don’t know why that is an arbitrary red line,
instead of just any innocent bystanders, period.
The hallmark moment of “The Shape of
Things to Come” is the execution of Alex. This is where Keamy becomes great (I
mean, he’s a major asshole, but he becomes a character you remember). I like
that it happens before Keamy finishes the countdown, so it still comes as a
surprise, and I actually think it’s a decent send-off, as opposed to Danielle.
It’s the first time since we see his childhood that Ben has really been
sympathetic, and the first time since, probably, the Henry Gale days that
present-day Ben was sympathetic. We really needed that, given that he’s going
to reveal himself as the architect of the Oceanic Six’s return.
“Something Nice Back Home” is one of the
most forgettable episodes in the entire show. It’s not actively horrible, but
it’s also not memorable in any way. The appendicitis does basically nothing
other than to give Jack a reason to be the focus of the week, Jin learning of
Charlotte’s Korean is irrelevant (maybe that would have tied into her aborted
backstory, but we didn’t get that), and there’s no freighter excitement, nor even
Ben/Locke/Hurley. So, it’s just sort of sitting there. I had heard an
interesting theory that stated Jack wanted to watch the surgery because he had
his appendix taken out already and that the island’s healing had effectively
regrown it, and he was in disbelief that it was there. That’s a bit of a
stretch (would lost limbs grow back as well?), but it would at least provided
some sort of lightbulb moment for Jack, who needs to be convinced that the
island is special in order to return. The illness, as it is, does not seem to
move anything in any direction.
The flash-forward, though, does show his
life spinning out of control, which forces him to realize that living in the
real world again is not all it’s cracked up to be. When Bernard tries to relax
him by saying he should “think of something nice back home,” we come to the
conclusion (as does Future Jack) that there really isn’t anything nice back
home. Jack is haunted by his father, and so is his secret sister Claire, as she
tries to reconnect with him (or what she thinks is him) in the jungle. She
abandons her child for the same man who abandoned his own child. And that man’s
son, who followed in his footsteps career-wise, is trying to get away from his
memory. Those parallels would be interesting to explore, but “Lost” had little
interest in the Jack-Christian-Claire triangle once they turned over that card.
Connecting the Dots:
Ben has a Parka in Tunisia because the
warp point on the island is in a frozen cave.
Ben says in “What They Died For” that
the monster actually summoned HIM with the weird dirty-water drain thing (which
he also uses in season five for his judgment). I take that to mean, the
summoning meant he was ready to cooperate with the monster in some way, and
perhaps MIB was waiting for that moment in order to spring the Alex-ghost on
him to kill Jacob. Still have no idea how the hell the drain works, or how MIB
knows that he is needed, but…a minor plot point in the grand scheme of things.
Widmore: “Everything you have, you took
from me.” We don’t quite see the lead-up to Widmore’s exile, but it’s made
obvious that it was Ben’s doing to get him sent away. So in that sense, it’s
true.
Charlie said Jack is not supposed to be
raising Aaron? Again with the Aaron stuff? I don’t know who or what put out the
bulletin that Claire must be the one to raise Aaron, but at least it kept
consistent in season five/six, as it draws Kate back to the island. There
continues to be no answer as to what would happen if Claire didn’t do it,
making the threat toothless.
Rose is confused that Jack has fallen
ill, since she knows that the island makes people better. The healing properties
I can get behind. The light source having healing properties (i.e. the temple
spring) is semi-established. It’s a little weird that it can just spontaneously
allow someone to get sick, even for the purpose of keeping them from leaving. I
know we can just chalk it all up to “magic island” and whatever, but a little
more reference to how it works would make me feel better about it.
Was that Cassidy that Kate was talking
to on the phone when Jack walked in on her?
In a deleted scene, Claire claims to see
her father after the house explosion. It’s not inconceivable that MIB would
have been lurking around, but because we see “Christian” in the next episode
anyway, it’s easy to see why this would be cut.
Ranking:
1.
The Constant
(10/10)
2.
Confirmed Dead
(9/10)
3.
The Shape of
Things to Come (8.5/10) (An action-packed installment that features a
distressing death, a legendary Smokey appearance, and a face-to-face meeting
between two power players that frames the story moving forward.)
4.
The Beginning of
the End (8.5/10)
5.
Meet Kevin
Johnson (7.5/10)
6.
The Economist
(7.5/10)
7.
Something Nice
Back Home (6.5/10) (A relatively average episode that doesn’t have any real
high or low points to speak about. Still not sure why they gave Jack
appendicitis…)
8.
Ji Yeon (6.5/10)
9.
The Other Woman
(5.5/10)
10. Eggtown (5/10)
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