Angry Robot

Lost Season Six Episode Thirteen, "The Final Recruit"

What’s going on with Sun? Her aphasia is either TV’s lamest plot twist or part of something yet to be explained. Why does she say that Locke caused the problem, and in the alternaverse how does she know he’s Mr Bad Man? One answer is that there is some bleeding of consciousness from one universe to another going on, as with Des (or with the other characters when confronted by death or love). Now, in these split-consciousness cases, what is the chronology? It is looking increasingly possible that they have seen more of one or both timelines than we have right now.

I’m used to watching Lost and making little mental notes of when things may not be how they appear to be – when there could be events missing between time cuts, when a character may know more than they let on, etc. etc. In this episode, there was plenty of that. But of course we’re running out of time for a) the writers to wrap up existing mysteries, and especially b) the writers to create any new mysteries. So I’m not going to read too much into any of the little ellipses in this episode.

Here’s hoping the writers don’t actually wrap up too many little details, as it’s more fun the more open-ended they are. I thought they did a fairly decent job of this in season five; the details of the Man in Black’s manipulations are left for the viewer to review – especially the things he did as Christian Shephard (“you’re going to have to move the island,” “you’re going to have to die, John”), which they’re only getting around to clarifying now.

A stupid little thing: in the ABC promo last week for this episode, there was a muzzle flash in a shot of Sayid with the gun (implying he shot Des). We actually nerded out freeze-frame style on the spot and thought there was something fishy about how it looked. Sure enough, in this episode, Sayid doesn’t fire at all. So we can pretty much assume Des is still alive and it was YAN Lost Character Death Fakeout.

Proposal: Locke wants to go over to Hydra island not because he wants to take the plane and the candidates off-island, but because he wants to use the electro-magnetic shocker shack to zap all of them permanently into the alternaverse. (I’m sure he’d like to kill Widmore and his nerds, too.)

Finally, what happened to Jacob? He’s been absent for what, three episodes now? In his absence, Des seems to have picked up the slack, with heavy duty interventions in the alternaverse and even a possible de-zombifying of Sayid (remember it was Jacob’s order to bring Sayid to the temple in the first place). Not sure what that means. Shit, I might as well wrap up every post with that sentence.