Lost: Sun and Daughter

Has our opinion of anyone on the island changed more since the start of the show than our opinion of Jin?

Think back to season one, when his temper and haircut were both shorter and more severe — he was an overbearing jerk. My girl Erica — who saw about three episodes of "Lost" before deciding that it wasn’t her — still thinks he’s a jackass.

Cut to last night with Jin vowing to follow Sun wherever she went and, after finding out about her infidelity, tentatively asking her if the baby was his.

Although last night’s episode ended with, in my opinion, a narrative cheat, this was one of the more emotional episodes in a while, and probably Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim’s best work ever on this show (especially Daniel Dae Kim).

I like Jin and Sun, but I don’t usually get too excited about the episodes that highlight them because their flashbacks have little or nothing to do with the rest of the Island drama. Also, it’s harder for me to type out notes on my laptop while the episode is happening, because I have to keep my eyes on the screen the entire time to read the subtitles for their Korean dialogue. However, when it became apparent we’d be looking at the couple’s future — Sun going into labor — I became more interested.

After briefly conversing with Faraday, Sun became convinced the freighter wasn’t there to rescue the castaways and convinced Jin that they should join Locke’s camp. Juliet unsuccessfully tried to talk Sun out of leaving by reiterating that she and her baby would die if she stayed on the Island.

Even though the last episode focused on her character, I think Elizabeth Mitchell’s work was stronger in this one. While I can’t really blame Sun for not trusting her (I never really know where Juliet is coming from), Juliet convinced me that she genuinely cares for Sun’s well-being (at least on a doctor-patient level). Also, her blurting out that Sun had had an affair in front of Jin to stop her from leaving was the episode’s "holy shit" moment.

I don’t get the feeling that was necessarily the writers’ intention. I’m guessing the episode’s "shocking" revelation was supposed to be the fact that, while we were lead to believe we were watching Sun and Jin’s off-Island future, it turned out that Jin’s comical panda-buying adventures actually occurred in the past, two months into his marriage and while he still worked for Sun’s dad. Oh yeah, Jin is also dead.

Now, I enjoy a good twist as much as the next person — I LOVED that Jack’s apparent flashback was a flash forward and the end of last year — but this revelation truly seemed to come out of nowhere. Maybe, I’ll feel differently when I watch the episode a second time and pick up on clues to the twist, but right now it just feels like the writers blatantly made its audience believe that both characters were in the same time frame for the sole purpose of giving us the "shocking" ending we’ve come to expect in the last few minutes of an episode of "Lost." We learned nothing new about Jin during his flashback scenes, and their sole purpose was to throw us off the scent. In my opinion, that's manipulative, and this show is better than that.

Then again, I always thought it was a little unfair that Jin and Sun (two fully-realized characters) always had to share a "flashback episode", so it was kind of good to see each character going through their own thing. Especially in the case of Jin, who was probably remembering a time when he wasn’t the husband he is now. The only problem with that is that we were meant to think that he was missing the birth of his child because of some silly episode when, in fact, he was just doing what his job was at the time. Sure, he was a drone doing a menial task for a bad man, but it’s not like he was roughing anybody up (like he would eventually), so I don’t really get how he was being a bad husband then, especially since he wasn’t missing out on anything (as we were meant to believe).

Either way, with a little help from Bernard, (in a nice scene — I didn’t realize they were the only two married guys on the Island) Jin found it in him to forgive Sun. Usually, whenever Bernard or Rose show up and interact with a character, it comes off as a bit random and awkward, but this time it worked quite nicely.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Jin made it off the Island — the date of death was Sept. 22, 2004 (the day the plane crashed) on the grave Sun and Hurley visited. As we all know, that’s not true, so do we think he’s really dead or is he one of those people stuck on the Island that "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!!" for (according to Jack). Even though it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which Sun would leave without Jin, I’m leaning toward the latter. They HAVE been separated before (Jin’s raft trip), and the way Sun weirdly called out for Jin during her delivery was slightly suspicious (and reminiscent of Jack demanding the hospital to get "his father down here" during his future freakout.)

Maybe Jin’s fake date of death is there to help keep up the appearance that the original castaways died when the plane crashed. We met the freighter’s "surprisingly forthcoming" Capt. Gault last night, and he revealed to Sayid and (a shocked) Desmond that Charles Widmore had hired his crew and that the world thought the passengers of Oceanic 815 had died thanks to the fake wreckage that’d been recovered. A wreckage, according to Gault, that Ben is responsible for. Maybe those 324 dead bodies in the ocean were extras they had lying around from the purge all those years ago that didn’t fit in that mass grave.

We also learned that Gault’s crew is suffering from some sort of cabin fever and apparently going insane. This was personified by upside-down reading crew member Regina. Here were my reactions to her scenes: "Hey, it’s Zoe Bell from "Death Proof." I like her, she’s cool. Whoops, that’s the end of her." I’m assuming we’ll find out what led her to tie a chain around her and drown herself, but my wild guess of the week is that she was Naomi’s sister. I’ve got nothing to back that up, other than the inscription on Naomi’s necklace ("N. I’ll always be with you, R.G.) and the fact that they both had vaguely Aussie accents. I’m also betting the "tell my sister I love her" thing was a code AND had a basis in reality.

I suppose the other holy shit moment was supposed to be the identity of Ben’s spy. But with actor Harold Perrineau’s name in the credits for most of the season, it was one of the worst kept secrets. Still, the scene where he —serving as the ship’s janitor — shuffles from one end of the hall to meet Sayid and Desmond was very effective (very nicely played by Perrineau and Naveen Andrews as Sayid). It looks like we’ll get Michael’s full story from next week’s preview, but my favorite idea floating around out there is that Perrineau is not playing Michael — he’s playing a grown-up version of Walt. I know he’s supposed to be a lowly janitor on the ship, but Michael/Kevin Johnson’s meek demeanor was a bit surprising.

So what’d you think of this episode? Did you see the Sun/Jin twist coming? (COULD you see it coming?) Does the Oceanic Six consist of Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun and Aaron or is there an additional member that’ll sub in for Aaron on that list? Finally, is Jin really dead?