Lost: Something Nice Back Home Season 4/Episode 10

Love or hate him (and I'm definitely one of the former) Jack is the center of this complex and mystifying world of Lost, and Thursday the show finally returned to focusing on his character.

On the island he is stricken with an appendicitis, an unusual occurrence for a place known for its healing properties. Is the island lashing out against the man most responsible for trying to orchestrate the exodus from the isle?

Juliet is able to perform the operation, but Jack is once again leery of surrendering control and demands to talk her through the operation by watching it in a mirror, sans general amnesia.

He starts to feel the pain and react, Juliet sensibly puts him out, Kate fails in living up to Jack's request to keep him awake, and the dang organ comes out.

This scenario, I must say, was stupid. I have a feeling the writers were trying to work in a way to establish trust/love/control issues between Jack/Juliet/Kate at the expense of putting a realistic scene together. 

Elsewhere on the island Sawyer resumes his almost parental supervision of the injured Claire as they try to return to the beach with Miles and Aaron. Along the way they come across the bodies of Rousseau and Karl (thereby verifying Danielle's death) and hide from the fleeing mercenaries.

There seems to be an awful lot of the bad guys left, considering the smoke monster went ga-ga on them last week. Perhaps there were more of them than previously thought, or maybe the monster is not the pure killer we presumed it to be.

In the night Christian Shepard appears to his daughter in the jungle. He was - seeing as he's dead - father to both Jack and Claire, although neither sibling is aware of the connection. In the morning she is gone, and Miles rather flippantly tells Sawyer that she left with her father. Aaron is found abandoned in the trees some distance away.

Let me pause here and survey the field: it is general knowledge that Claire and Jack are half-siblings, right? There were clues galore in the first few seasons, and to top it off the writers themselves outed the 'secret' some time ago.

Anyhow, back to . .well, back to the future.

It is post-trial, and Jack and Kate are now a couple, and a hot one at that. Jack seems to have taken to Aaron despite earlier misgivings and all is well. Later in the show Jack even proposes to Kate, who gladly accepts.

But . . and in Lost there is always a but: Jack goes to see Hurley, who is now refusing to take his medicine in the mental hospital. He is very much a downer this time around, telling Jack they (the Oceanic Six) are all dead and never left the island. He says that Charlie told him Jack is not meant to raise Aaron, and that he will be getting a visitor soon.

This begins to unhinge Jack, who sees what we presume is his fathers ghost in the hospital where he works. Shaken, he requests and receives a prescription to Clonazapam and begins to drink heavily over the next few days.

A short time later Jack comes home early to find Kate mysteriously out and Aaron under the care of a sitter. When she returns he confronts her and she admits to doing a favor on behalf of Sawyer. (let it be noted Jack states Sawyer chose to stay on the island, confirming his future and in all likelihood his survival to that point).

An argument breaks out, with both sides overreacting and nothing happening worth the breakup that seems to follow the fight. The only thing of value I picked up was Jack's admonition that Kate isn't even related to Aaron, which could mean he knows he is, or it could mean nothing more than she isn't his biological mother.

In the Lost chronology, I place the fight prior to last season's finale. I think the prescription and drinking foreshadow Jack's decline to come, and his sighting of the ghost explains his drunken request to see his father in that same finale.

One theory floating around that might have some weight to it. Item One: Miles can legitimately 'hear' the dead. That's a fact, at least in the Lost universe. Ok, fine. He is also an ass, but not one that's overly evil or willing to harm others, at least to this point. Yet when a stranger shows up at the campfire in the middle of the jungle and walks away with a injured woman and her infant son, he does nothing to stop them or raise an alarm.

So . . what are the chances that Claire perished in the bombing of her home last week? The island has been known to grant the dead a brief physical form when it deems it amusing. Is it possible she's been dead since then but unaware of it, as in The Sixth Sense, and that Miles recognized this and therefore wasn't upset when her father came to guide her to 'another place'?

Again, just a theory I heard. I'm not sold on it, but it does have merit.

Take it a step further and I suppose Hurley could be right, and the Six are simply manifestations of their departed spirits. Except I believe that Hurley's just plain sick at that point in the show, and wrong about their status.

Or maybe as the episode's title 'Something Nice Back Home' indicates, maybe the Oceanic Six and Jack and Kate's love affair is nothing more than a nice idea that Jack thought about to take his mind away from the pain, just as Barnard suggested.

Hmm.  A lot to think about, as usual. Wait and see.

Tags: Lost, blogplugs