Sunday, May 4, 2008



LOST
Season 4 Episode 7
“Ji Yeon”
Written by Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz
Directed by Stephen Semel
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

And the neighbours were said to have heard: Bastaaaardds!!!

Okay, let’s do it like this; let’s divvy this up between on the Island, on the freighter, and off the Island…

On the freighter:
Frank takes a whole bunch of canned goods to Sayid and Des, who are under lock and key once more after their unauthorized excursion to the comm room, during which time poor Minkowski did an Eloise.
On guard, Regina in the flesh, portrayed by Zoe Bell. Finally we see Zoe. Only to have her wrap some chains around herself and jump overboard.
Bye bye, Zoe.
WTF?!
And I thought Fisher Stevens came and went…

Anyway, no one even tries to jump in to save Regina, and Sayid and Des finally meet the freighter’s captain, Gault (Grant Bowler), who says that a) a number of his crew have been having some mental issues, as evidenced by Regina’s swan dive; b) there’s a saboteur on board; and c) the ship belongs to one Charles Widmore (so, Ben wasn’t lying about that).
The captain also shows Sayid and Des what is supposed to be the black box recovered from the Oceanic 815 crash, where all those corpses were found, including one that was supposed to be Sayid…
So the captain claims that the man behind the elaborate ruse (which required 324 corpses as props) is one Benjamin Linus…

Returning from their audience with the captain, whom Sayid wryly describes as “surprisingly forthcoming,” they’re moved into a new room, and who do they meet but Kevin Johnson.
You know, Kevin! Who looks exactly like some scummy traitor known as Michael.
Of course, Sayid and Des are on the ball, and don’t let on to the fact that they recognize this schmuck. (Of course, right now, I’m doing some memory scrabbling and trying to recall if Des was sober enough to have remembered Michael…)

On the beach:
Jin and Sun are talking baby names, but Sun doesn’t want to jinx it, so she doesn’t play along. Jin thinks it’s going to be a girl, and wants to name his daughter “Ji Yeon.”
When Kate and company get back, Sun asks what went down, and Kate tells all (I love Sun’s reaction to hearing that Charlotte whacked Kate on the head; go, Sun! Show that Brit b!tch some Korean whoop-a$$!), including the fact that Juliet euphemistically referred to the poison gas factory as a “power station.”

This penchant Juliet has for sometimes avoiding the truth like the plague, gets Sun suspicious once more of the Other woman, and after unsuccessfully trying to get something out of Daniel in regards to their rescue, she gets it into her fool head to go join Locke, because she doesn’t trust these newcomers.
But when Sun needs some prenatal vitamins from Juliet, Juliet is deathly opposed to the idea, since Sun really needs to get off the Island, and quick. But Sun’s gotten dubious about Ju-Ju’s claims, so she’s off for LockeLandia.
Kate draws the Kwons a map and all, and tells them she has to tell Jack, but she’ll give them a good head start first. Sun says she wanted to tell Jack, but decided not to because “he wouldn’t understand.”
But Ju-Ju busts that party and at first tries to tell Jin about Sun’s condition (as Jin explained to Jack earlier, he understands English better than he speaks it), but when Jin says, Wherever Sun goes, I go, Ju-Ju whips out her trump card: Juliet tells Jin about Sun’s affair! (And although I understood precisely why Juliet said that, I still so hated her guts just then.)
Sun slaps an already beaten-up Juliet (ouchee), and Jin stalks off back to the beach.

Sun tries to explain, but Jin just wants to go fish. Luckily, Bernard, bless his soul, arrives, and at first unaware of the argument, asks Jin if he can tag along.
Bernard realizes he’s walked right into the middle of something, and is apologetic and is backing off, when Jin says it’s okay.
So the only two married men on the Island (well, from 815; who knows how many of the natives are married; come to think of it, some of the 815 sock puppets could be married too, but how are we to know?) go fishing, and Bernard tells Jin about Rose’s cancer.

Back on the beach, Juliet tells Sun, I just had to stop you from leaving.
Ju-Ju then outlines the next handful of weeks for Sun, an inevitable scenario that ends with her death, and right after that, the baby’s.
You’re my patient, Juliet says, and you need to get off this Island.
When Jin gets back, he prepares dinner for Sun (Jin’s practicing English is adorable), and basically says, I know the man I was back then, before the Island.
I know that what you did back then, you did to that man.
I forgive you.
(Which, let’s face it, already slew me at face value, but in light of our final Off the Island section, well… devastating…)
Jin says, I’ll go with you to Locke’s camp, but Sun says, I don’t want to go there anymore. Juliet was very convincing.
They have a helicopter, she says.
Jin says, I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you and the baby…

Off the Island:
A very pregnant Sun, back in Korea, goes into labour.
Cut to Jin, who’s frantic to get to the hospital, but passes by a store to buy a stuffed panda first.
With Sun, it’s all labour pains and new doctors (her usual one is at a conference, damn him!), with Jin, it’s all, played for laughs, need to get to the hospital, oh crap, I need to buy another panda, oh more crap, my cell phone just got ran over.
So all through this, I had a bunch of suspicions.

Suspicion A: this new doctor and that nurse doping up Sun were evil, evil I say.
They were here to steal Sun’s baby, to study it, it apparently being the first infant to have been conceived on the Island, and to have lived to tell the tale. (Unless Ben used to do that in the past—get the preggers women off the Island before they reached their third trimester, have them deliver off Island, then bring them back when both mother and infant were a-ok—which I always wondered about and I believe I mentioned here at the Iguana before.)
Anyway, it would be that whole Knots Landing, Oh, we’re so sorry, but your baby died during labour, but then Valene just knows she gave birth to a baby that was alive, and no, I was not confused by the drugs, where is my baby you bastards?!
So.
Anyway.
Evil baby snatchers.

Suspicion B: somewhere along the way, I began to think, Oh no, what if they both got off the Island, but in the end—due to the whole Sun having an affair thing—didn’t end up together, and Jin’s actually hurrying up to get to some other woman who’s now his wife, who just happens to be delivering at the same time as Sun.
Of course, if I had had the luxury to think this suspicion through, it would be impossible for Jin to have both found (and perhaps married) another woman and gotten her preggers so that her delivery would coincide with Sun’s. (Unless Jin actually physically time-traveled somehow and that his sperm stayed healthy and alive even after he’d gotten off the Island…)
Anyway, the core of this particular suspicion was that Jin was not heading to Sun’s side, that when he got to the hospital, we’d have the reveal of some other woman with her newborn baby.

Suspicion C: which, before we get into it, I must say, was a niggle at the back of my mind, pretty much overshadowed by Suspicion A (Evil! Evil!), was that Jin and Sun were in different timelines (which would also have worked hand-in-hand with Suspicion B).
But as I said, it was a niggle, so when the reveal came that they were indeed in different times (Sun, post-Island; Jin, two weeks into their marriage, and he was hurrying to the hospital to deliver the panda to some ambassador or other, on orders of Sun’s evil da), the immediate question which overrode the small, though still significant surprise, was, Where’s Jin?
And this is the point where I irrationally shouted at the screen, Bastaaaardds!!!

Hurley shows up to greet the proud mama and Ji Yeon, and then they all troop off to see Jin… who’s in the cemetery.
I say again, Bastaaaardds!!!

I can only assume at this point that Jin did do all he could to protect Sun and the baby, and this is the price.
If so, though, is Jin considered part of the Oceanic Six (as a nurse points Sun out to be)?
Officially, with verbal confirmation on the show, it’s Jack, Kate, Hugo, Sayid, and Sun. We’ve seen Ben, and of course, Aaron, off-Island, but neither were 815 passengers. Or is an unborn infant considered a passenger?
Is Aaron part of the Six, or not?

Of course, my steering the pondering over to the Oceanic Six question is simply me trying to avoid having to deal with Jin’s upcoming demise.
It’s Charlie all over again…
But, as hard as this is going to be, at least I get to psyche myself out for the inevitable, as opposed to, say, the sudden departures of Shannon (Ana-Lucia, you b!tch!) and Libby (Michael, you bastard!).
Still.
I say again, Bastaaaardds!!!

Or was that part of the elaborate ruse and Jin’s still alive, on the Island? Though I doubt that possibility, as I can’t see Sun going through the masquerade of visiting an empty grave just so she could get me to blubber like an idiot…
Of course, the date of death on Jin’s marker read September 22, 2004, the date of the 815 crash, since he was purported to have died then. But that still leaves us with possibilities…
Either Jin really did die back on the Island, and Sun can’t really have the date of death on the grave marker changed because that would contradict the “official story” of the 815 crash, or the visit to the cemetery was indeed part of the ruse and Jin is still alive, back on the Island.
Graaar! I say again, Bastaaaardds!!!
Now I don’t even know if I should prepare myself for Jin’s demise or not…

Sigh.
I love this show.

COUNTDOWN: 41.

(Images courtesy of ABC, ew.com, and variety.com.)

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