I Could Kill Every Single One of Your Friends and There's Not a Thing You Could Do to Stop Me
Three more episodes left! The black and white ambiguity of the season was completely torpedoed in this episode, and I'm left like Hurley on the beach, sobbing...I don't know who "The Candidate" was in this week's Lost, but let's talk. This is going to be loooooooooooooooooooooong.
There is no more Sayid.
Sun and Jin drowned.
Frank Lapidus probably drowned, too.
Well, fuck. That hurt. I suppose we all kind of expected both Sayid to be a sacrifice at some point, and he made a noble choice in this episode to let himself get blown up so his friends could hopefully be saved. And poor Frank Lapidus, well, I'm really not sure how the hell he made it this far anyhow. I mean, at least with Ilana, she convinced Ben not to go to the dark side. But Frank - was he just a red herring this whole season? He just pretty much sat in the background, offering one-liners. Some of them good. Some of them...not so good. But still, he was the only character on this show who didn't seem to have any baggage, and I think we took to him because of that.
When Kate got shot - I was shocked because I thought she was dead and that was ballsy (and no, I don't hate Kate. But she came back to save Claire and she almost accomplished that). But it looks like Kate somehow lived.
But Sun and Jin? That was just brutal. Hardest of all for me, partially I think because of Ji-Yeon. I'm still holding out some kind of mad hope that she's candidate Kwon, which would explain some of the ambiguity about "is it Sun?" or "is it Jin?" but...at this stage, I'm going to guess no, probably not. Them dying so that Ji-Yeon is essentially an orphan (yeah, she gets raised by Mrs. Paik. Color me not thrilled) hurts as much as their death. Like I said, seeing Hurley break down on the beach crying for his dead friends - that's exactly how I felt. Do you think Jin made the right choice, to die by his wife? I'm a little conflicted about it.
Let's talk about UnLocke. He was relentless last night and it was terrifyingly badass. Bullets bounced off him like he was a maniac anti-Christ Superman - shooting down, throttling, snapping necks, and smoking out. Kind of awesome, and while everyone was in the cages - wow, I loved hearing the rickety sound effects of the smoke monster. Something's been bugging me for the last couple weeks since he supposedly copped to being Jack's dad, though. UnLocke told Sawyer he couldn't travel over water, and if he was masquerading as Christian Shephard, I wondered how he got off the island to visit Jack's hospital - how did he get on the freighter to cruelly dismiss Michael? Now, I kind of wonder if that whole line to Sawyer was part of a long con. If he's just been bullshitting everyone all along about this - he really can leave, but first, he's got to make sure all the candidates - every single one of them - are dead. Even if he can't do it himself.
ETA: As I said in the comments with garunya , I'm also remembering now that when Ajira landed on the Hydra island was the point where smokey took over Locke's body. And he'd been on the main-island before that, at least the last time we saw him. So perhaps that was a clue all along that he could actually travel over water, and what he really wants has nothing to do with going home, but killing everyone, or at least, all the candidates.
I loved every single scene with Jack and Locke. I liked how at the beginning of the episode Jack called Locke a candidate. (Is he The Candidate? Or is Jack The Candidate, as Sayid seemed to imply?) I love the conflict between those two characters - and I love how Jack has inherited the man of faith role. And poor Sawyer - he thought the whole time he was going to be able to con the smoke monster only to get conned himself in the end. Instead, he got some of his friends killed, inheriting Jack Shephard's role. Of course, that's assuming that not touching the bomb would keep it from going off...but I seem to be more of a believer on this one.
So all in all, the endgame is in play, the deaths are mounting, and if there's any doubt that this is Lindelof and Cuse's The Stand, well, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I'm going to read what other people posted about it.
Three more episodes left.