Lost: Par Avion Screencap
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Mania Grade: A
Episode: Par Avion
Stars: Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Mathew Fox, Michael Emerson, Elizabeth Mitchell
Created By: JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof

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"Lost: Par Avion"

I’ll be honest with you, when I heard this was to be a Claire-centric episode I wasn’t so excited.  I like her well enough but she just isn’t figured that centrally into the series for me since the others took her baby, which was a story thread that just sort of came and went.  Finally this week, she gets some opportunity to be truly connected with the series again, and on top of that things progress nicely with the search for Jack leading to a pretty fantastic cliffhanger.  If you Tivo’d the episode, you may wanna check it out before you read this review. 

So, Claire has figured out a way, a long shot, of getting a message off the island.  For some reason she seems to know a lot about migratory birds and when she sees a flock of them fly above the island she knows they are tagged, and the tags will be checked.  With the help of Jin and Sun, she builds a trap to catch one of the birds.  Desmond scares the birds away just as she’s about to catch one and Charlie is reluctant to help.  Sensing that Charlie is lying to her again, she sends him away.  This bothered me right away because I though “Ok here we go with the on again off again Claire/Charlie thing.”  Speaking of that, hasn’t Claire let Charlie back in pretty quick after his nutty spell?  Anyway, this time Claire wasn’t about to let things slide.  She knows something is up with Charlie and Desmond and she is determined to get answers this time.  It could be a statement about how she has finally let herself care about Charlie or she could just be sick of the way these to whackos are acting.  She follows Desmond who knew right where to go to find a bird for Claire and she forces the truth out of him.  This leads to a commitment from Claire to help Charlie get through it.  Normally a story like the one Desmond tells her would be a hard pill to swallow but not considering their current situation and all the other strange things they’ve all seen. 

At the same time we are treated to a Claire back-story.  Seems like the writers of LOST have an affinity for the alt-kids as they’ve made at least three of the castaways this type of character.  Not that I’m complaining, I much prefer that to the metro-sexual men and model-ish women of series like the OC and most anything that airs on the WB.  So Claire has her hair jet black and she works in a tattoo and piercing establishment.  When we first see her she’s just been in a car accident that puts her mother in critical condition with only machines keeping her alive.  A stranger is footing the bills for all of the medical expenses.  Claire seems to be more surprised at this than her aunt, who’s a total b*tch by the way.  The stranger just so happens to be Jack’s daddy who decides to head down under for a visit.  It turns out, in one of the big twists in this episode, that Claire is the result of a fling he and her mother had.  So, that makes Claire and Jack half brother and sister.  Claire sends the good doctor away having never even gotten his name, so of course she has no reason to suspect her relationship with Jack.  Wouldn’t it have been amusing if Claire and Jack almost hooked up all Leia/Luke style in a previous episode?  This twist is a fun way to further connect two of the main cast and I hope it actually means something in the grand scheme of things.  Oh and it turns out that Claire spent a lot of time watching nature shows with her Mom while she visited her in the hospital.   

Claire writes a note to be attached to the bird and Charlie reads it over a montage of shots of various cast members doing what they do on the island.  I liked this little moment, it was a subtle emotional peak without being as heavy handed as Hurley’s musical montages used to be. 

The third part of the episode involves Freckles, Sayid, Locke, and Russo dragging the eye patch man along as they follow the map to the compound of “The Others”.  This segment is definitely the strongest and it features many tense moments, especially between Locke and Sayid.  We know that Locke may not want to leave the island and it’s clear from last episode and this one that he has his own agenda.  At one point when eye patch man is challenging the group he very nearly reveals Lock’s secret that he was paralyzed before crashing on the island.  The look on Locke’s face is both intense and hilarious.  I’ve been waiting for this secret to come out and this little tease was a ton of fun.  It’s obvious at this point that Locke knows that eye patch man has to die.  So when they reach an apparatus that they determine is an alarm system, Locke believes that he has the opportunity to take out eye patch man.  He pushes the eye patch man into the area of the alarm and some sort of invisible sonic signal kills the man right there on the spot.  Previous to that, Locke and Sayid argued over the destruction of the fire base and Locke tells him that it would have helped if Sayid had informed him that the base was in fact wired with explosives.  When the group decides to build a bridge across the alarm Sayid finds a block of C4 in Locke’s bag when he goes looking for the hatchet.  Sayid tells Locke that they’ll discuss his lies later.  I loved all the tenseness between Kate, Sayid, and Locke.  It’s also very intriguing to follow where Locke is going with his decisions.  It’s about time more came out about this character and it looks like that’s going to happen next week. 

In the final moments of the episode the group finally makes it to the subdivision of the Others.  When they see Jack running across a nicely manicured lawn, Kate instinctively wants to run to meet him but Sayid stops her.  It’s a good thing too because Jack was actually playing a little touch football!  This was a hell of a cliffhanger leading to many questions.  Has Jack given in to the Others for a trip home?  I don’t think so, but it’s there anyway. 

These three segment episodes are truly the way to go.  Last week and now this week both featured a main cast segment, a flashback, and a story arc segment.  I really appreciated that the main cast segment this week wasn’t just comedy relief.  I do like the humor but there are some opportunities for more character development in the main cast and we were given a taste of that this week.  The question remains: was the flashback an important twist or just cotton candy?  I don’t know the answer to that yet but I really enjoyed the ride.