“There’s No Place Like Home, Part 1” | The A.V. Club

So here’s where we stand as hour one ends:
Jin, Sun, Aaron, Michael, Desmond are on a freighter that may be about to blow up;
Juliet, Bernard, Rose, Charlotte & presumably Miles are back at the beach;
Daniel’s on a rubber boat;
Sayid, Kate are surrounded by Richard Alpert & the Others;
Jack, Sawyer, Frank are making plans to ‘copter off the island as soon as they can rescue Hurley;
and Hurley’s parked in the brush with Locke outside The Orchid, waiting to see how Ben’s new plan--to surrender to Keamy--is going to work out.

All of which raises question: How in the world are Jack, Hurley, Sun, Aaron, Kate and Sayid going to get off the island together and become The Oceanic Six?

-The structure of this finale—with flash-forwards covering multiple characters—mirrors Season One’s three-hour conclusion “Exodus.” mm yes nice. I wonder if there will be any other similarities?
-I like Sawyer’s comment to Jack as he followed him into the jungle: “You don’t get to die alone” Way to throw the doc’s words back at him, big guy. Live together, die alone.


Flashbackin’…Season Three, Eps. 13-16:

This group of episodes included two of my favorite mythology-rich episodes, “The Man From Tallahassee” and “One Of Us”—the first of which reveals the details of Locke’s paralysis and introduces the idea of Ben’s “magic box,” and the second of which continues the story of Juliet’s transformation from meek medical researcher to duplicitous murderess—as well as the fairly scattered “Left Behind,” which juggles handcuffed-Kate-and-Juliet on-island thrills with merely functional Juliet-and-Cassidy off-island flashbackin’.
But I want to start this week with one of the more divisive, controversial episodes in Lost history. Season Three, Episode Fourteen. Better known as…

“Exposé”
As I’ve indicated before, the problems with “Exposé” are twofold.
Firstly, the Lost creative team erred by trying to integrate Nikki and Paolo into the show well before they were needed. didn't mind that. & probably was meant to ward off viewer complaints of them appearing out of nowhere, shld have been eased in. If they wanted to do a story about the background characters, they should’ve introduced these two as a one-off.
Secondly, it may have been a bad idea in the first place to try to do a standalone episode in the middle of a tightly serialized show, especially when the potboiler narrative was finally starting to heat up. ok. might have bothered me, I suppose, if following week to week rather than watching season as a whole.“Exposé” is more of a fanfic idea, or something for the series of Lost novels that some enterprising publisher will undoubtedly produce after the show is over. fair enough. but since it was so good a standalone - see next paragraph - maybeworthwhile to air as actual episode so that most viewers saw it
And yet, as an entertaining hour of TV, “Exposé” is pretty hard to beat, from its Rosencranz & Guildenstern approach to Lost lore right - cool: same events viewed from perspective of now central formerly side characters to its twist ending y that has Nikki waking up from her temporary paralysis just before Sawyer buries her and Paolo alive. Fun, fun stuff.
But it’s more than that too. “Exposé” follows through on several of Lost’s core themes: the villain’s redemption, the perils of mistrust, and mysteries within mysteries. It also, I’m half-convinced, contains one whopper of a clue about what’s going on in Lost’s meta-narrative, teased in the show-within-the-show. If you’ll recall, Nikki’s character on the striper-crimefighter series Exposé discovers right before her death that the man she thought was her boss and friend (played by Billy Dee Williams) is actually the criminal mastermind she’s been fighting against. Now, while I don’t think Lost big reveal is going to be quite so clunky—if only because “good” and “evil” are a little more fluid on this show—I have been watching ever since for hints that one of our beloved castaways is actually behind everything that’s been going on. that'd be int Did the mega-rich Hurley finance this whole adventure in some way? nah no way - he's not faking his horror of the numbers. Or did Locke arrange it all as one big game? also no way. Again, I don’t think the real answer is going to be quite so ungainly, but in this season in particular, Lost has been edging closer to revealing that Locke in particular might have a hidden history with the island that even he doesn’t fully know. well yes. but now, you've seen last week's episode where this was clear (visited as infant and as small boy by Alpert, then after his fall by Abbadon). After all, in “The Man Behind The Curtain” (which I’ll be writing about next week), doesn’t Jacob look an awful lot like Terry O’Quinn? And doesn't the Jacob reveal look a little like the Billy Dee Williams reveal in Exposé? so, good reasons for Expose have aired as an episode of the show proper.

Quick notes on the other eps:

“The Man From Tallahassee”
In Locke’s flashback, he’s watching Exposé.
Did we ever find out definitively whether Locke blew up Ben’s submarine, or if he faked it? no. And who here thinks that the submarine was just a prop in the first place, designed to provide a cover for how Ben and his inner circle really get on and off the island?
Great Ben line, when Locke wonders whether he secretly signaled Richard and Mr. Friendly: “We don’t have a code for, ‘There’s a man in my closet with a gun to my daughter’s head’…although we obviously should.” This episode is awesome, by the way.

“Left Behind”
In this episode’s appearance of the smoke monster, it flashes bright lights at Kate and Juliet. What’s that about? I really like mirrormattermoon theory explaining smoke monster as interactions coming through from other-handed matter world (our world) as light & evidently as force
A lot of people were surprised by the way Juliet got the drop on Kate in this season’s “The Other Woman,” but it happens in this episode too. As badass as Kate may be, Juliet is apparently her kryptonite. these recaps are well written - by Noel Murray

“One Of Us”
The writers have played all kinds of games with the fans when it comes to Juliet, teasing us about whether she’s a force for good or for ill, but they’ve been very consistent about a few aspects of her personality: She was fundamentally sweet and caring before Ben Linus got a hold of her, and she’s got a smart-ass sense of humor. One of her best (and first) one-liners came in this episode, when Hurley asked her why she wasn’t on the dock when he was shackled and bagged, and she responded, “I had the day off.”
This show has always been good at reunions, and “One Of Us” has one of the best, with Jack, Kate, Sayid returning to the beach, and Sawyer—up until that moment, the new leader at camp—hesitates before hugging Kate (and Jack!). [above, in recap of current epis: I’ve always liked Lost’s “reunion theme,” which appears way more often on the show, usually accompanied by slow-motion hugging.]
This episode is awesome too.