Is the show captivating because it’s so mysterious? Or is it getting too mysterious for its own good?
I don’t know about you, but I groaned in the second season of “Lost” when we started getting backstories of a whole new group of people, the Others. Like we needed more to keep track of. Tonight, the “rescuers” finally landed on the island and we got a couple of their flashback backstories before we even met them in the present. So now we have the original plane crash survivors, the Others, and the Other Others. And, like the naked city, they’re full of a million stories. And my brain hurts. I’ve stopped even trying to crack the code of this madness. Just sit back, watch the puzzle pieces fly around, try to see the beauty in it, like the whirling trash in “American Beauty.”
Tonight’s recap (spoilers!): A helicopter from the allegedly offshore freighter encounters a storm (of course) and crashes on the island (of course). The four passengers wind up scattered across the terrain. There’s Daniel, a bewildered physicist who doesn’t lie very well. There’s Miles, who we see in flashback plying his services as a ghostbuster and speaking to a young dead guy in his bedroom before pocketing a wad of the dead guy’s drug money. There’s also the helicopter pilot, a saucy fellow who says he was supposed to be the pilot of the ill-fated Oceanic plane that day. These three wind up with Jack, Kate and the others, who salvage their helicopter and prepare to fly to the boat, all without (of course) getting any real answers from any of them.
There’s Charlotte, a cocky anthropologist, who we see (a) in flashback discovering the skeleton of a polar bear in an excavation in Tunisia, complete with Dharma Initiative collar, and (b) winding up with John Locke and his crew of wayward transplants who’ve opted to try and stay put on the island. Ben, once more adamant about the alleged threat these newcomers pose, swipes a gun and shoots Charlotte. She is, however, wearing a bullet-proof vest. Is that standard equipment for a rescue mission…?
It all wraps up with the original three newcomers freaking out when they discover that Juliet was not an Oceanic passenger. Miles aggressively asks her where Ben is because he’s who’ve they’ve come for.
