Please don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of this show, having watched it since day one. I’m just doubting the writers know even one iota of where they want to take these characters. They give us tremendous amounts of back story to replace the lack of progress they’ve made with the show. The past two weeks are a perfect example of this having wasted three episodes focusing heavily on the history behind Desmond and Juliet while refusing to address them in the present day.We know Desmond can predict the future and we even kinda know why, but the episode made no attempt at connecting that to any sort of forward progress. Just rehash, remix and repeat. With Juliet we found out what she was up to before she came to the island but in all honesty, it didn’t really tell us much as to her current motivations. It was wasted space where they show could have tried to shift this thing out of neutral.

What about the statue? The other hatches? The smoke monster? Locke? Hurley? Claire? Rousseau? That black lady with teh cancer? The numbers? The aftereffects of the hatch imploding? THE OTHER HATCHES? Sun and Jin? Charlie and his recovery over Eko’s death? Does he finish building the church? The church? THE OTHER HATCHES? The list goes on and on but instead we’re treading water, waiting for the shark we just jumped to come back and finish us off. But NBC in its infinite hype decides to inform us that this week we’re going to discover all sorts of things and have all sorts of questions answered. See every episode of Heroes I’ve reviewed for my opinion on such promises.

That said, this episode was a little better having only spent about half our time with a storyline concerning Jack and his adventures in Thailand with a girl named Achara. The other half actually took place in modern day and revolved around the usual trinity of Jack, Kate and Sawyer. I remember there being other characters on this show and they used to be more than accessories to those three but that was so long ago I’ve truly forgotten what it was like.

So Jack gets moved out an outdoor holding pen while Juliet is cuffed and imprisoned for killing Danny and letting the prisoners escape. More likely is that she’s being punished for trying to move this plot along. We go around in circles in the flashback game as Jack tries to figure out what Achara does for a living. All we know is she gets paid in envelopes, sneaks off and has “a gift.” Contrary to popular belief she’s a tattoo artist and not a lobbiest for big tobacco. Well more to the point she “marks” people because she can “see who they really are” which begs the question from Jack, “well who am I really?”

Captain Obvious would like to answer that, if Achara would be so kind as to go be crazy in the corner for a minute.

Jack is the rich, privileged son of a rich, privileged man. He has this faux crisis in his life, gets dumped over and over and eventually ends up on a retarded island where he bumbles around pretending to be a leader, eventually culminating in him being kidnapped by the Others to perform spinal surgery on their leader. Somehow all that translates in some Chinese characters and bad tattoo art chisled onto his shoulder. The judge over Juliet’s case Isabel can apparently ready the letters and they play a little game with the audience called, “Who Can Be The Smarmier Fuck Over Something The Audience Doesn’t Know?” Basically she knows what it means and finds it ironic. Jack knows what it means and is indignant. The audience has no fucking clue what it means and gets to sit there, the proverbial monkey in the middle of this ridiculous game.

Otherwise in Kate and Sawyer-land, we discover from Karl that the Others actually live in houses “with backyards” and not in abject poverty like previously thought. Oh, and the next night there would be no moon and they’d get to see the “Teddybear Constellation.” Well gee, all my questions have been answered so far. Thanks Lost.

Well, the show’s finally over. We discovered the island itself is a black hole in the middle of the South Pacific as part of a classified experiment by several world governments. The smoke monster was just a biological weapon gone wrong and the castaways return to their lives as if nothing happened, thanks to neuroagents injected into them after they’re retrieved one by one from the beach. Claire is Jack’s half-sister, Eko was really a woman and Charlie had steamy sex with the love child of the polar bear and Locke and what the fuck did you expect from this review? Nothing’s solved, everything’s murky and Lost is still trying its best to play the confused old drunk in the corner, firing off cryptic clues and then laughing uncontrollably when you don’t connect the imaginary dots only he can see.

This week we get to concentrate solely on Desmond and his trials and tribulations. While in the middle of a meeting between Locke, Sayed, Charlie and Hugo about Eko’s death Desmond freaks out like Charo and goes diving into the ocean to save Claire who was, until then, thought to be taking a walk. He later claims he just “heard her” but Charlie and Hurley know better, they know he can see the future. Words get thrown around drunkenly, Charlie calls Desmond a coward and gets tackled for his trouble. Then we get to find out what happened when Desmond turned the override key at the end of last season. Between the turn and waking up naked in the jungle it turns out he is returned several years to when he was still in London, dating Penny and sucking up to her father. Generally speaking it seems normal to him as if he didn’t remember what the future held but little things here and there give him insight like Penny telling him it isn’t the end of the world followed by the microwave beeping. Just little things.

Numbers get bandied about as he arrives for his interview with Penny’s father. Trying to appeal to the patriarch he tells him that he and Penny want to move in together. This turns ugly fast as her dad rejects and utterly humiliates Desmond and tells him he isn’t worthy of his daughter. This ends, predictably, poorly and he leaves the building and walks out to find Charlie, also in London and playing his guitar on the sidewalk. This leads to a spark of recognition from Desmond who suddenly remembers everything about the future including the sudden downpour that he predicts a moment before it happens.

Desmond confides in this best friend about his new discovery. His friend who happens to also be a physicist is skeptical. Just like in any he calls the final score for a sporting event on TV followed by the appearance of an acquaintance of theirs smacking the bartender with a cricket bat. But neither of these things happen, instead he just looks like an ass and heads home to a sympathetic Penny. They get all tender with each other and the next day he finds himself buying an engagement ring for her. All seems to be going in a good direction until the clerk plays the spoiler and transcends the show, telling him he can’t buy the ring because then he won’t break Penny’s heart, enter the sailing competition, end up on the island and live for three years pushing the button and saving the world. I believe I saw her nametag and it read “PLOT.”

So PLOT and Desmond wander around town a bit while Desmond tries to figure out if he’s dreaming, crazy or just the central character on a recently disappointing but overall worthy television show’s latest episode. Using the death of a red shoe-clad man our white-haired expositionary woman turn Oracle tells Desmond that everyone has their path and that there’s no deviating from it, as life will always put you back on it no matter what. Apparently unwilling to pay attention or respect, Desmond takes off with the ring anyway to give to Penny. But after they get their picture taken, the very same picture Desmond carried with him all those years on the island, he realizes there’s no escaping fate and breaks up with Penny.

He escapes to the bar where he realizes he had made the prior day’s predictions prematurely and that the football game would end as he said he had sudden hope that he could change the future. So up he goes only to see that acquaintance stroll in with the cricket bat and, in a moment of retarded heroism, saves the bartender from it and takes it to his own head as a result. That shakes him back to the future where once again he’s naked in the jungle. Then we replay the first few minutes of the episode with the drinking and the tackling and all that followed by Charlie helping a bumbling Desmond back to his tent where Charlie’s told in the single actual useful moment of the episode that Desmond has seen his future and that Charlie is going to die. Jumping into the ocean was trying to prevent Charlie from drowning. Setting up the lightning rod last week was because he saw Charlie hit by a bolt. But he knows that there’s no preventing the inevitable and that Charlie is going to die.

Or maybe the show will forget about this like so many other storylines.

lost |lôst; läst| (adj): (1) unable to find one’s way; not knowing one’s whereabouts.

This is where I believe the writers currently are. Lost returned to us last night after the winter hiatus and Captain Obvious was pretty psyched having waited through the break tiding himself over with Gilligan Island episodes. Oh that crafty Professor, I bet you he would’ve figured out that smoke monster by now. So heading into the new episode there were questions a’ plenty regarding our castaways, the others and all the other random island happenings. Surely they’d at least focus this episode on them, right? Hee hee, right.

The past two three several episodes have been mainly focusing on Jack, Kate and Sawyer, living as <s>prisoners</s> guests of the Others on a small island about two miles off the coast of the main island. I guess you consider it their ’summer island’ for when life gets boring on the mainland. Before christmas vacation we watched Kate and Sawyer get their dirty bits all tangled up, Jack and Juliette kinda hover around an interesting storyline and Ben wandering around, creeping out the bugs. Then what ho, Jack discovers Ben’s spinal tumor and under much duress (and prodding by Juliette as a potential way of killing Ben without anyone knowing he meant to kill Ben) agrees to operate on him. So Jack intentionally tears Ben’s kidney sac (how porn does that sound?) and tells the Others he’ll let Ben die if Sawyer and Kate don’t go free. Yadda yadda, Kate and Sawyer escape and this week’s episode begins.

We learn about Juliette’s background back home. I hate the way Lost lives in flashbacks so I’m not going to reveal it all slow and methodical-like but instead just tell you what the fuck is up with her. She’s a doctor, pretty good one too researching fertility problems using experimental medications. She worked under her ex-husband, career wise and not in that other dirty way, and was pretty happy remaining anonymous and obscure in her research but then interviews with a company that’s ‘not based in Portland‘ who offers her the chance to study some really screwed up cases involving really screwed up reproductive system behavior. She tells them no, that her ex wouldn’t even let her if she wanted to and that the only way she could ever escape all that would be her ex-husband getting hit by a bus. Then she wigs out and takes off, retuning to her office. Outside her building, however, she runs into her ex-husband who, predictably, gets hit by a bus. The company she interviewed with approaches her again a few days later and bada-bing she’s now on the island.

Meanwhile Jack paces around only to discover Ben has regained consciousness mid-surgery. He requests to speak to Juliette who later confides in Jack that Ben offered to let her finally return home if Jack would just finish the surgery and save Ben’s life. In return for this Juliette would help Sawyer and Kate escape and eventually does.

Kate and Sawyer in the meantime wander around the jungle a bit until they run into Alex (Rouseaux’ and Ben’s daughter) who offers to lend the two her boat if they help rescue her boyfriend from what turns out to be some sort of Others reeducation center. They break into the place and find him in a room strapped to a chair in front of a large screen flashing images and messages at him. I’m sure all the hardcore Lostreopithicans out there will be slow-mo’ing their way through that footage. Probably hints about why the second season existed if all they did was introduce and then slowly kill off all the tail section members. So they break ol’ boy out and make their way to the beach where Nina finds her boat and all is about to be hokee-dokee when Danny emerges from the jungle and holds them at gunpoint. Sawyer starts to move toward him but Juliette is faster, emerging from the jungle and shooting Danny, letting all of them go with the exception of Alex who can’t be allowed to leave on account of her dad’s wrath. Kate and Sawyer (with Alex’s boyfriend in tow) have absolutely nothing to say about this and happily take off and… LOST.

So what did we learn this week? Well. Nothing. Really, entirely and absolutely nothing. They took what most shows would treat as ten minutes or even a commercial break and stretched it into an hour, and what for? I’m all for back story but there are better ways of doing it than creeping along. This episode reminded me of every term paper I wrote in elementary school where I would start them off, “I thought long and hard about what to write about with regards to ‘SUBJECT’ and in doing so discovered that I found ‘SUBJECT’ to be very, very interesting in a lot of unexpected ways. I say unexpected because I didn’t think I would feel this way about ‘SUBJECT’ but in doing my research I kept finding myself more and more and more and more interested in ‘SUBJECT’ and that came as a big, big surprise to me.” That would continue for about twelve pages and in the end I always got a D, and rightfully so. I learned my lesson back then, don’t fluff up what doesn’t need to be fluffed. Concise is appreciated, brevity rewarded and mentally jerking off onto paper is never warranted. I feel that’s what Lost failed to realize last night. They mentally jerked off all over the audience and didn’t even bother giving us a towel.

So last night we made some headway in the standoff between The Others and our hapless captives Jack, Kate and Sawyer. What had turned into a mildly frustrating Groundhog Day of near escapes, kisses, nookies, surgeries, revelations and executions finally transcended into utter chaos and we found what approximates on the island as closure.

Sawyer and Kate got it on and now there’s all ooey gooey in love with each other. I guess living in cages for a while can do something for fledgling relationships after all! Gives me hope for my little experiment in the attic. We also discover that Kate, prior to going to Australia was married to a cop! Funny how opposites attract, huh. She was running from the law, namely some chisel faced US Marshall, and running from herself at the same time. Once a father-blowing-up hardened criminal, always one. Her plan of settling down and playing the housewife was going well until hubbypants decided their delayed honeymoon was going to, you guessed it, Australia! Just a day prior she was planning taco night and now she was in a aqua caliente. There she sat at the table listening to his plans her face twisted like he was crushing puppy skulls with his fist while talking. Why? Oh that’s right. Fugitives on the lam can’t leave the country cause fugitives on the lam can’t get passports!

Which begs the question: so how did she get out of the country anyhow? Another day, another Lost.

Anyhoo, she gets all emo and tells her cop husband that she’s a fugitive. She just can’t do taco night and she can’t do the housewife schtick anymore. .She turns to leave, he tries to follow but dum dum dum she drugged his drink so he collapses in a heap. She leaves the “something borrowed” her mother-in-law gave her on her wedding day in the hand of the something she blew.

Back in present day we get to watch Jack struggle with his decision about whether to operate on Ben or not. Juliette had asked him to agree to operate on ol’ creepypants as an opportunity to kill him, botching the job. Jack ends up playing the jackass and refusing so The Others do what The Others always do and threaten one of the other captives to force a different captive to do something. This time they threaten to kill Sawyer to get Kate to tell Jack to do the surgery. For those of you keeping track from home, it doesn’t work.

So in the night Kate sneaks out of her cage to boink Sawyer, doomed to die because of Kate’s failure to turn Jack. Jack, meanwhile, sneaks out of his room thanks to some mysterious female and gets himself a gun and a sneak peak of a post-coitus Kate & Sawyer. Then Ben walks in and Jack, in a moment of ABC-nility, decides getting away from The Others is more important than, oh I don’t know, shooting his way out and rescuing his friends. So he agrees to do the surgery as long as it means his ticket off their prison island.
So the next morning Jack gets all scrubbed up to do the hatchet job while bad men come to kill Sawyer. The clouds decide to rain for dramatic effect. Jack appears to be cooperating but then makes a small incision in Ben’s kidney sac to cause a bleedout within an hour. Using this as leverage he gets a radio from one of The Others and calls over to Kate telling her to take off, that she has a one hour head start. Heh, no mention of Sawyer tho.

Will she stay or will she go? We won’t find out until February because ABC hates us and wants us to suffer. Thank the frakking gods for Battlestar.