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- Episode: Through the Looking Glass
- Starring: Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Mathew Fox, Michael Emerson, Elizabeth Mitchell
- Created By: JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof
LOST: Through the Looking Glass
By
Stephen Lackey
May 24, 2007
Terry O'Quinn as John Locke on LOST: "Through the Looking Glass"
© ABC
So, it finally came, the season finale of LOST. So, would we be disappointed? What would be this season’s cliffhanger? These questions plagued me as I sat down in high anticipation in front of my television for the two hour finale. This season started out weak and many people gave up on the series. When it returned from the winter break, it returned with a vengeance with one fantastic show after another. I was happy to see after a rocky ratings start fans started coming back. The series became the number one most TiVo’d show and it even moved back in front of Heroes in the ratings in recent weeks. So, was it worth coming back for? Well, for me that question was answered within a few of the spring episodes but for many fans I’ve talked too who did come back to the series this finale would determine whether they’d be back for it in January. Well, if this finale is any example of what we are in for over the next three seasons I couldn’t be happier.
If you Tivo’d the episode and haven’t watched it yet, stop reading right now….
After the episode was over, I literally just had to sit back for a few minutes and just process everything that happened. There were so many new twists and turns it nearly made my head spin, yet they all seemed to make sense within the fabric of the series. Some sequences were expected and other maybe weren’t expected but I did predict them. The season finale of season two gave us something new, a scene off the island that wasn’t a flashback, a scene of Penny who is apparently still looking for Desmond. This must have been the planned start of a trend because this season gave us something new too, a flash-forward if you will, a look into the future, after the castaways have left the island. I have such mixed emotions about this portion of the episode because the flashbacks are usually shown as memories that while giving us answers to questions also display what might be influencing a character to make certain decisions in current time on the island. So what do these flash-forwards do for the characters? They obviously give us answers and build the mystery but at the same time because they don’t apply to the characters in current time they don’t affect them making the sequences feel isolated from the main story, something that’s not an issue with the flashbacks. Obviously, we won’t know the true effect the flash-forwards will have until next season, and that’s if they continue because the idea that these scenes were a flash-forward was one of the twists in the episode. I never suspected as I watched that we were seeing the future until Kate’s appearance at the end. I was flabbergasted and obviously the implications of an impending escape for the castaways are mind boggling. Let’s get into the flash forward, just a bit.
So we see Jack, a beaten and broken man with new facial hair! He’s drinking heavily and flying on planes often. One night he’s sees a newspaper clipping that someone has died and he makes a call but gets a voicemail. He’s so devastated over the news that he pulls over on a bridge and is about to jump off when a car crashes and he instinctually goes into hero mode saving a woman and her child. After the accident, Jack is still a mental mess and the woman when she becomes conscious tells another doctor at the hospital where Jack works that she saw him about to commit suicide and that’s why she wrecked to start with. Jack’s not just drinking now; he’s also addicted to drugs. In a confrontation with the doctor, we get one very important bit of dialogue that goes by so fast it could have been easy to miss. When asked about his drinking Jack says something to the affect of “go upstairs and bring my father down here and if I’m drunker than him then you can fire me.” Isn’t Jack’s father dead? Remember we even saw a smoke monster representation of Jack’s father on the island. I don’t believe this to be a continuity error. This means something, I just don’t have a clue what. More on the castaway’s trip home later.
So down in the Looking Glass, Charlie has been tied up by the two women guarding the facility and is being tortured for answers. This episode was one of the best for this character. He’s sort of like a Jedi who has accepted his destiny and knows there’s no way his fate can change so it doesn’t really matter what these women do to him. It’s this attitude that in fact pushes his destiny forward. The women call Ben and tell him about Charlie who gladly announces to Ben who he is. Ben sends one of my favorite characters, Mikhail or eye patch man, to the Looking Glass to find out what Charlie is up to. The Others didn’t know the facility was operable and they begin to question Ben about it. Finding out about this lie and the disappearance of Locke is eating away at Ben’s control of the Others.
Once on the beach, Mikhail takes a few shots at Desmond who has just woke up from being knocked out by Charlie. He dives into the water and swims down to the Looking glass. Charlie convinces him to hide and wait for an opportunity to strike. Of course while he’s in hiding, Mikhail shows up and contacts Ben from the radio where he confirms that the jamming equipment is in working order. For a minute, it seems like Mikhail’s loyalty to might be wavering but he does follow through with Ben’s orders to kill the two women and Charlie. Before Mikhail can finish the job, Desmond puts a harpoon in his chest. See this guy must have nine lives, first a blast from the sonic fence, and then a harpoon and he’s still going all Energizer Bunny style. Charlie is able to coax the blonde girl to give him the code to deactivate the equipment before she dies. He does turn it off and that’s when the remainder of his destiny begins, and the next major event of the episode begins. Once the jamming equipment is deactivated, Charlie immediately makes contact, via video, with Penny. Penny tells Charlie that the boat that Naomi came from is not hers and she has no clue who Naomi is. Just then, Mikhail pecks on the window from outside the base and shows Charlie a grenade. Charlie slams the door shut so that when the grenade explodes Desmond won’t drown. I love this scene with Mikhail, he’s such a ham, but he’s surely dead this time, maybe. Even though we knew this scene was coming Charlie’s death still came off moving with he and Desmond doing a Kirk/Spock thing with their hands against the glass. In his last minutes, Charlie continued to try and be a hero by writing on his hand that the boat doesn’t belong to Naomi. One could question why Charlie didn’t step out of the room and shut the door sealing in the water and allowing him and Desmond to both survive. I thought this during the commercial after the scene myself. My conclusion is that first off Charlie had accepted this as his destiny so it had to happen, and more logically if Mikhail saw Charlie leave the room (and there were a few seconds between the reveal of the grenade and the explosion) He’d come back into the base to finish the job and the equipment might get reactivated. Charlie isn’t my favorite character, but I did like the combo of Charlie, Sawyer, Jin, and Hurley together, and now that’ll never be the same. It was moving and meaningful to the series, all in all a good send off for a lead character.
So the night before Jin, Sayid, and Bernard are set to shoot the dynamite and blow the Others to hell when they come for the women. They are partially successful. Sayid and Bernard hit the target and kill seven of the Others while Jin either missed his shot or the dynamite he was to shoot was bad, either way they ended up captured. With very little convincing Bernard gave up the entire plan to Tom who relayed it to Ben. Ben and Alex set out on a trip to intercept the castaways at the radio tower to convince them to not follow through with their plan. Ben is so cocky saying that he will simply talk them out of it, but I actually believed if anyone could pull that off it would be him. Once he and Jack meet, Ben does fail though, even when he has Tom kill off Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. In another very satisfying scene, Jack beats the crap out of Ben. Ben’s had this coming for a long time, and I think he fully expected it. Once the group makes it to the radio tower, they are contacted by Hurley who tells them he rescued everyone and reveals the fact that Sayid and the rest are still alive. I never believed for a second that they were dead and I don’t really think the writers expected us too. The whole trick only ran for a few minutes in the episode. Since Charlie did his job, Naomi is able to do hers and the radio works, but she gets knifed by Locke before she can finish the call.
I predicted last week that the island would heal Lock and I was right. He awoke in the pile of bones to discover that his legs were again paralyzed, or at least he believed that they were. He grabs a gun and points it at his head but before he can pull the trigger a much taller and deeper voiced Walt appears before him telling him to get up that he has work to do. Walt is, of course, an illusion formed by the smoke monster. His appearance did get me thinking about Michael and Walt. What do you really think happened to them? Knowing what we do now about Ben do you really think he’d just let them leave the island and take a chance on them revealing its location? I hope we get a definitive answer on that somewhere along the way.
At any rate, Jack picks up the satellite phone to complete the call and Locke threatens to kill him. Jack is exhausted and doesn’t seem to care anymore and he calls Locke’s bluff. Locke lowers the gun and says something to the effect of “you’re not supposed to do this”. This line ties back in to what we know about Naomi’s boat and the reveal at the end that the flashback is actually a flash-forward or at least some sort of alternate future. In the final moments, the person Jack has been calling answers and agrees to meet him at a special place at the airport. That person is Kate and she says I have to get back because “he’ll be wondering where I am”. Is the “he” Sawyer? Is the dead person Jack wants to talk about Sawyer or someone like Locke? At any rate, Jack says to her that they “weren’t supposed to leave” and that they have to go back to the island. I was riveted to these final moments. Jack’s future does look bleak and someone else involved does appear to die so maybe Locke was right when he told Jack that he shouldn’t finish the call. Interestingly, part of Ben’s argument for Jack not continuing to the radio tower was that the people on the boat were “the bad guys”. Ben has done this before, tried to convince someone to do what he wants them to do by giving up just a little bit of the truth. So, who are the people on the boat? Looks like we’ll know soon enough because the answer Jack got on the phone was that they are on their way. Could these bad guys be connected with DHARMA in some way? Maybe since Ben and the Others killed everyone so many years ago DHARMA hasn’t been able to find its way back to the island. I can’t believe that the entire DHARMA organization died on that island. As I said, I was completely blown away by this episode, there were some fascinating twists, some predictable some not, and the drama was perfectly executed. I haven’t even covered all the great smaller moments in the episode, those with Juliet and Sawyer and with Kate and Jack, and Hurley’s adventure saving the day. One other quick thought, when Ben split from the Others he told Alpert to keep going to the “temple”. I think that’s the first time we’ve heard that term used. I really hope we see this temple next season. Not one minute of this two hours was wasted, it was jam packed with filler free storytelling, absolutely the best season finale of the series and the best and most satisfying season finale I’ve seen of any series this year. By the way, I just wanted to take a minute and let you guys know that I’m going to start logging in and updating the blog each week. So if you have questions or comments feel free to post to the blog and I’ll get them answered!
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