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Adam David loves Lost: watching it, thinking about it, reading about it, listening to podcasts about it, talking to people about it. Now, he’s blogging about it!

 

Lost Season 6 Episode 8: “Recon”

 

I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration when I say that this is the most predictable Lost episode since maybe Season 3. Even Kate’s recent episode had a few surprises. With this episode, after the initial spit-take with the revelation that the Parallel Reality Sawyer is a police detective (with Miles as partner, a detail I absolutely love), everything was more or less ho-hum, even Island Reality Sawyer’s many flipfloppings and looking-at-people-through-my-bangs, but then Sawyer has been very predictable ever since Season 2, so saying that doesn’t account as a particularly sharp observation.

The sharp dramatic ironic contrasting between realities remains to still be very interesting –after all my bickering in the paragraph above this, Cop Sawyer is so far the best Parallel Identity so far – and further cements the notion in my noggin that the Island, ie, Jacob, has been nothing but an utterly malevolent presence in their lives, which is a very interesting thing to think about, especially in context to what the show’s been setting up as an Ultimate Showdown Between Good and Evil. The refusal to oversimplify Good and Evil is a conceit in the show that often seems too drawn out (we’ve had six seasons of it already!) something that I think the show telegraphs to the viewers too often and often lacks in impact as the stakes don’t seem to be too high for the characters (up until Locke’s death, of course), but it’s still very effective and a little fun to watch even when you know ultimately it’ll be very brutally simplistic in the end. I mean, the Man in Black has already been called on screen as “evil incarnate,” and you just can’t go any more brutally simpler than that! But I’m still enjoying it, and enjoying entertaining the thought that the ending won’t be as brutally simplistic as I think it’ll be.

Francis Q, a friend of mine, mentioned his theory about the Parallel Reality already being a essentially a reset of the story from whatever the ending will be, so it’s essentially a loop but not a mobius strip – a variation of the theory that the Parallel Reality Narratives are the epilogue endings of the characters, a What If scenario shown to us just for the sake of – but I didn’t buy it the same way I didn’t buy the Epilogue Theory: the dramatic payoff is not that strong, and it’s a whimpery end for everyone, an end that just stays there and does nothing. And they lived happily ever after? Big deal. I’m still holding on to my Man in the High Castle Theory.

But a good variation on the Epilogue Theory is that the Parallel Reality Narratives are actually the first half of the season’s narrative, and that it will end a la my own theory – the Losties will be made to make a choice between the two realities – and that the Parallel Reality Narrative’s ending will actually be the beginning of this season’s Island Reality Narrative, and that it will all end in a loop towards the beginning where we find out that the bones that the Losties found in the caves way way way back in the first season were the bones of Jack and Locke: they’ve always been on the Island!!!

Funny bits in this episode were Sawyer Cop sexing up the suspect, the nearly-gay buddy cop thing that Miles had for Sawyer, the bit with the Others seemingly not knowing who the Smoke Monster is, Sayid looking on dopeyly as Crazy Claire attacks Kate, and the “I’m the Smoke Thing” confession. Interesting bits were the dead in Hydra Island (for some reason, I don’t think the MIB killed them), and Widmore’s double-padlocked door in the submarine. Widmore and Co’s presence sort of debunks this theory I’ve been tossing around in my head for a few weeks, that after the bomb explosion, somehow the Island exists isolated in Space Time, and the mention of Miles’s dad was also great – a possible key evidence for the Parallel Reality Losties to pursue if and when they realise that their Reality is wrong, and that they have to go “back” to the Island. Also: Charlotte’s so white, and she still has the crazy eyes. I love those eyes! And hey, look, it’s Debbie from Singles! Only with a rifle and glasses, looking very much like a Lostverse Tina Fey!

 

Next: Finally, Ricardo tells his tale!