Season
5, Episodes 3 and 4- “Jughead” and “The Little Prince”
Summary:
Desmond,
Penny, and their son Charlie return to London to look for Faraday’s mother, and
Desmond finds Daniel’s old lab. A custodian name-drops Theresa Spencer, and
Desmond follows up to find her in a vegetative state from Daniel’s experiments.
He then goes to see Widmore after learning he is paying for Theresa’s expenses,
and receives an address in Los Angeles. Penny decides they are going to find
her. Faraday, Miles, and Charlotte are caught by the Others and taken to a
campground to meet Richard, who thinks they are U.S. army. They figure out
there is a hydrogen bomb leak nearby, and Faraday offers to fix it. Locke,
Juliet, and Sawyer have a couple Others hostage and ask where Richard is. The
one with the tag “Mattingly” kills the other and runs away, and Locke fails to
shoot him because he is “one of my people.” As Ellie marches Faraday to the
bomb, “Mattingly” returns to the camp, unaware that he was followed. Faraday
studies the Jughead bomb and determines it needs to be buried. Locke strides
into the camp and tells Richard that Jacob sent him – learning in the process
that “Mattingly” is a young Charles Widmore. Locke tells Richard about events
in the future, including patching up his leg, being named leader, and visiting
him as a baby. Another time flash occurs, and Charlotte begins to bleed and
convulse.
Kate
lets Sun watch over Aaron while she meets with Dan Norton to figure out who is
angling for custody of Aaron. She and Jack follow Norton to a hotel room with
Claire’s mother, but Jack learns she knows nothing about Aaron. Norton is
instead revealed to be Ben’s lawyer. Jack, Kate, Ben, and Sayid rendezvous at
the marina and Kate deduces Ben is trying to take Aaron away from her. Sun is
watching them nearby with a gun. Faraday says that the time flashes throw off
people’s internal sense of time, causing the hemorrhages and slight amnesia.
Locke determines they need to return to the Orchid and bring back the others in
order to stop the time jumps. They return to their camp which is ransacked, but
they find an outrigger canoe and take it into the water. They are shot at by
some faraway pursuers before another time jump. Miles and Juliet have started
bleeding. Elsewhere, Danielle Rousseau’s French expedition team picks up an
unconscious Jin floating on debris in a storm and takes him to land.
Review:
The best thing “Jughead” has going for
it is the absence of the Oceanic 6, allowing us to finally concentrate on the
past. It’s a thrill to see the Others as they were decades ago, and it
reinforces their method of taking over societies which they eliminate (the army
camp, DHARMA, etc.). While they don’t make a big deal of it, Locke’s meeting
with Richard serves as the inception point of a lot of his story, as it leads
Richard to visit him as a child and give the illusion that he is some sort of
“chosen one.” But in fact, there is nothing really special about Locke, he just
happened to be swept up on this time travel journey and be put in a position
where he appears to know more than is possible. He’s lucky, but not special. As
for the title of the episode, the Jughead bomb is needed for the season’s
climax, and this excursion gives the writers an excuse to not only have a bomb
ready for the final moment, but to have the characters know exactly where it
is.
As Eloise and Widmore drive Desmond’s
story in the present, they are conjured up in the past and their connections to
the island are finally made clear. My only complaint is that Young Ellie’s line
delivery is pretty weak, but, visually, the castings were well-chosen.
Charlotte’s bleeding and collapse finally delivers a dangerous proclamation for
the time jumps, and spurs us into putting a stop to it instead of finding more
interesting history to explore. As for the Desmond thread, it does seem like a
bit of a time-killer in order to shove him off to Los Angeles. Because nothing
much comes of it (Eloise is already hot on the island’s trail, and Desmond
doesn’t participate in the return flight), it doesn’t seem as important on a
rewatch. However, it’s always a good thing to see Desmond running around
Britain. I am not sure that putting Charlie’s birth at the very beginning was
the best choice. You could maybe have saved it for later in the episode; the
fact that he needed to name his son after a friend who died on the island
likely indicates that the people left behind are more important than he
realized, and that revelation could be the kick that convinces him to follow
Faraday’s request. But, top-shelf episode.
The conveniences of Dan Norton being the
lawyer for Ben, Carole, and Hurley are a little too contrived and serve
primarily to pull the rug out from under you at Carole’s house, which isn’t a
big reveal that needed to happen. Same for the gun and photos sent to Sun. The
truth is, the Oceanic Six story isn’t terribly interesting yet so they are
trying to add little moments of drama to juice it up, but it rarely converts,
and the characters crisscrossing Los Angeles just makes it harder to keep
everything straight. This is ostensibly a Kate-centric episode, yet she doesn’t
seem prominent enough to warrant that honor.
Sawyer is, of course, prickly about what
Locke has planned for stopping the time jumps and bringing back the O6. When he
sees Kate helping Claire deliver the baby, it serves as new motivation for him
to get the job done. He seems to accept Locke’s theory (that they need to bring
the others back to the island) a little too easily, so maybe it would have been
better to emphasize a need to reunite Aaron with Claire, whose whereabouts are
still unknown. At long last we get to see the French expedition team, and I
think the impact is blunted by slipping a commercial break in between its two
scenes. The reveal that Jin is alive should be in the closing scene (and
preferably before Sun is seen brooding in the car), and I don’t think Danielle
should have been foreshadowed by Locke saying, “Anybody speak French?” By that
point, we should all know what’s coming, and Danielle saying her name at the
end is not the big “WHAM” moment it was meant to be. Just have the gang notice
other debris on their beach and cut to the boat. Smart fans might guess as to
what is coming, but it still makes the big moment hit.
Connecting the Dots:
Locke tells Richard when he is born,
which is what prompts Richard’s visits in “Cabin Fever.” It’s also how the
compass gets into Richard’s hands in order to be passed back on to Locke in the
season five premiere (the compass has no origin point).
The U.S. army is using the island for
bomb testing. Clearly Jacob and the Others are not going to tolerate that,
regardless of the soldiers’ good/bad assignments or who was a candidate. The
Others killed them and took over their campsite. This is another little subplot
I wouldn’t have minded some exploration on.
Charlotte is the first one to fall ill
from the time skips because it is proportional to the time you have spent on
the island. Charlotte lived there for several years, so she would fall first. Juliet
had lived there for 3 years, so she should be next, followed by Miles.
Charlotte’s incoherent ramblings before
death could be similar to the non-sequiturs Juliet says in “LA X.” Maybe
Charlotte is flashing into her afterlife universe, although she is saying
things from her childhood instead of the moment that she is “awakened” (unless
her awakening WAS in childhood, which would be weird, and would also suggest a
different afterlife than the rest of our Losties, since she did not seem to be
awakened whenever we saw her).
The beam of light that they see in the
jungle is said to be from when the light turned on in the hatch when Locke was
pounding over it. Of course, that light was extremely faint and could not have
made that beam. The beam actually resembles the season two premiere when Kate
is taken into the hatch. This is confirmed to be a production error.
Okay, here we go: the outrigger. That
half of the shootout was never solved on the show. Despite multiple incidents
since then of people traveling in canoes, we never got to it. Darlton said they
had plans to answer it, and it was even in a script, but was dropped to focus
on more important matters. There was some supplemental material of a journal
from the Black Rock that describe several crew members getting into a canoe and
all but one jumping overboard from cabin fever. So far, this seems to be the
generally accepted answer.
Ranking:
1.
Jughead (10/10)
(The adventure in 1954 is full of revelations and firmly establishes that the
time jumps are dangerous. Add in Desmond’s mission and the lack of Oceanic Six,
and you’ve got another very fun hour of television.)
2.
Because You Left
(9/10)
3.
The Lie (8/10)
4.
The Little Prince
(7.5/10) (While the off-island stuff is dry, the outriggers, nosebleeds, and
French scientists keep it going at a nice click.)
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