Last episode, I concentrated on what made an episode of Lost work for everyone. Then they made an episode just for me. Getting Clancy Brown (Brother Justin from Carnivale) into the Lost mythos was cool enough, but introducing the chick who was too hot for Star Wars was completely unexpected. All J.J. Abrams needs to do now is get Baltar and any MST3K cast member into a flashback and this will officially become my favorite show evar. (I would also accept cameos by Dave Foley/Kevin McDonald, Tamlyn Tomita, and any one voice actor from Futurama, so they're partway there.)
I was looking for hidden details, but this episode appeared to be fairly on the surface. What worked for me: I like it when we learn answers to mysteries of minor/symbolic importance and when my conspiracy theories are disproven. This time out, we finally learned what Jack's tattoos meant. (If you weren't wondering about that, you don't spend enough time on teh Interweb.) To mix my genre examples and alienate the few people who I know read this site and have never seen either show, the "He walks among us, but is not one of us," satisfied my Jack and Sawyer Are the Two Halves of John Crichton theory. And although I was hoping that there were two competing groups of Others, one on the second island and a dirtier group on the main one, I like it when I'm wrong about the mystery. It gives me new stuff to speculate about.
For people who are not me, there was still a lot to like in this episode. The "current" timeline advanced by a day and a half. We aren't going to see Jack for awhile, and when we do, he might be in a place to ask some relevant questions (i.e. in The Other's backyard, cooking burgers on the grill). And the relation between the flashback and island storyline was more than superficially symbolic. It not only reiterated that Jack's a stubborn, self-destructive jerk (the guy's a doctor and yet he has sex with a woman he suspects of being a prostitute in Thailand?), but it dove-tailed with what we know of Juliet's history. She keeps getting involved with guys who want to control her actions and then asks someone to kill them. Good luck in the future, Jack.
The usual LOSTcasts shout-out goes to their episode title connection. Never having read Heinlein, I wouldn't have come up with it myself. But apparently if you know the plot of the novel, you'd begin to suspect that Jack will become the leader of The Others by the end of the season. Although as they point out in their podcast, having the power to decide whether Ben lives or dies, Jack's pretty much in control of their destiny already. Which begs the question all my non-spoiler sources are avoiding. Other than maybe being born on the island, what makes Ben so special?
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