Two posts in a row!
Here's why I have trouble swallowing Libby's death, and this is straight from the horse's mouth on Ask Ausiello...
Ausiello: Why did you kill off Libby?
Carlton Cuse: We felt like we had run out of story for her. It happens. While we did develop the romance with her and Hurley, we didn't see enough in the way of avenues for where to go with that character.
My only response to that is, WHAT THE FUCK?! What do you MEAN that you ran out of stories for someone you hadn't even STARTED fleshing out?! We knew next to NOTHING about Libby, other than she was in an psych ward with Hurley and had some secrets. Outside of that, nothing. You are seriously going to try to make me believe this woman had LESS stories than SAWYER?! Granted, I like Sawyer to an extent, you know what to expect from him and his character, but seriously, the damaged bad boy, how many stories is there to tell about that?! Hell, even my favourites Jin and Sun doesn't exactly have a plethora of stories, yet we've already had four for them.
Libby gets not ONE flashback of her own, and the producers are screaming that they couldn't see where her character could go? They hadn't even fully written a path for her to go down, much less the length of it. She was a clean slate, how is someone who is a clean slate boxed in to a point where there is no place for her to go!
I'm also not thrilled with the "We aren't finished with her yet, we'll flesh her story out postmortem". That's a huge, gigantic cop out. Why bother to flesh a story out postmortem when you say they aren't interesting enough to keep alive to begin with?!
Anyway, as for the episode itself, it was ok. I'm still pissed about the time inconsistencies they have. Michael says the Henry left about a half hour before everyone got there, yet when they were talking at the beach it was bright sunshiney outside, like right above their heads, as opposed to pitch black night when they finally get to the bunker. It's even more disturbing when Eko gets to the bunker exactly when they do, and he supposedly left much later to get there than THEY did. Am I supposed to believe that Locke spent HOURS telling them that Ana was being a little crazy and going for revenge?
Another thing that got me, was Hurley MUST have waited WELL over 12 hours before he really started asking about Libby. Granted, he may have already asked but, personally, I would have been a little bit worried considering ANYTHING could have happened and she was ONLY going for some blankets! Not to mention it went from pitch black outside to noon-like sunshine fairly quickly as well.
I do like that Eko has had his faith reaffirmed, and feel like they are all there for some bigger purpose, and then in the same blow Locke is led to question his own faith, and the futility of all the actions he's made to this point. Eko believes in a driving force bigger than any of them, Locke believes solely in the island. It's telling that Locke so non-chalantly throws out that Boone was a sacrifice that the ISLAND demanded.
Again I was let down by the backstory. It was just, blah. I didn't care about the Claire's psychic saying he's a fake (but seriously, if he's a psychic and knows Eko needs to be on a certain plane at a certain time, wouldn't he have said ANYTHING to get Eko to drop the investigation to get him on the fated plane?), and honestly, we didn't learn anything new about Eko, other than confirmation that Libby WASN'T an other and WAS on the plane.
I did laugh outloud when Sawyer showed that he had had the weapons on the beach the whole entire time! I also laughed when not only did someone mention that, hey, maybe our only doctor going on crime fighting sprees isn't smart, but they also remembered, oh, hey, heroin has medicinal purposes as well!
Bad Jack for holding that syringe that way as well, I have NEVER seen a doctor or nurse approach me with a needle the way he did Libby. I cringed when it wobbled after he stuck it in her arm.
All in all, lackluster, but that's pretty much status quo now for this show.