5.4 “The Little Prince”
When's the next time they get to be this happy? Courtesy tvsquad.com.
At the risk of angering my three devoted readers into hurling wrathful cyber-tomatoes at me, I must admit that I have always been fairly immune to Sawyer’s sardonic bad boy charms. But holy macaroon, I think I was converted somehow during last night’s episode. That almost tangibly raw yearning in the ex-con’s broody gaze as he watched Kate help Claire give birth was so gut-wrenchingly romantic that I found myself wishing I had a Sawyer of my own. (Dibs on this one if Kate and Jack are meant to be after all—doubtful, because he also kind of belongs to me.)
Ahem, so anyway.
Given the latest bout of nosebleeds, I feel compelled to at least half-heartedly apologize for my previously misguided apathy towards Charlotte’s health issues. Because I actually like Miles, and even Juliet is starting to grow on me, sort of like a fungus would. The whole situation is also a fantastic learning opportunity: if Faraday (who is still being unhelpfully cryptic as hell, in case you were wondering) is right about their ailment being a function of “duration of exposure to the island,” then my suspicions about Miles may have been confirmed. I was not, however, brilliant enough to theorize a possible explanation for this: he is Dr. Chang’s son all grown up. If that is indeed the case, then Baby Miles could have been living on the island at the same time as Gangly Young Adult Charles Widmore and, presumably, a pint-sized Ben. My guess is that Miles’ and Widmore’s eventual departures from the island are probably connected through some mind-boggling means wrought with Insidious Implications and Severe Snafus.
Recalling Theresa Spencer’s condition, we can also expect this time travel jetlag to worsen by severely catatonic proportions—although technically, this only counts as one of the many “terrible things” that will befall our island trekkers until the Oceanic 6 return to rescue them. While we’re waiting, would anyone care to make a wager on when Faraday’s body is going to start bleeding out from the nostrils? Ever since he was seen lurking around the Orchid in the season premiere, I’ve been wringing my brain like a sponge trying to figure out what the hell it all means. First I speculated that he had somehow been on the island before, but that made next to no sense. Then something else occurred to me—what if then was just another now, or rather later relative to now but before now’s time? That is to say, what if Faraday landed there on another temporary stop in his time travels? And what if he was there doing some reconnaissance for Locke, who plans on leaving the island in the same manner as Ben did?
(About that, though. Does he really think it’s going to be as simple as giving the wheel another whirl? If he turns it at the wrong time—that is, at a time incongruent with Current Island Time—then there’s is no telling where, or more importantly when, he will end up.)
Speaking of Ben, he’s got something fishy-smelling hidden up his sleeve (for instance, does he plan on using Aaron to blackmail Kate into going back, or is he up to something else no good?), and even if Sun doesn’t know what it is, I bet she still has a pretty compelling reason for literally gunning after the guy. Plus, if he has even less than the “less than 70 hours” that Creepy Hooded Lady gave him at the end of the premiere, I have to wonder if his ultimate goal behind the reunion really is to get them all to return to the island. Saving their friends from a terrible fate doesn’t strike me as a terribly urgent concern of his. What did Sayid say about this guy? He’s on nobody’s side but his own. Yeah, I’ll believe it.
And speaking of Sayid, someone really has it in for the poor guy. That someone also knows where Kate lives. Now, finger-pointing at Ben would be my first instinct, but offing Sayid seems counterproductive to his plan, whatever it is, and he already turned out to be Lawyer Norton’s mysterious client. Really, I think that’s enough evil for him to dole out in one episode. The only other known character that comes to mind, however, is Widmore, and I can’t quite figure out what his intentions might be. Other than, of course, getting back at him for killing all those people when he was working for Ben—which Sayid was only doing to avenge Nadia’s murder, but suppose Widmore wasn’t the man behind that in the first place. Is Ben dealing more tricks to everyone at the table, or am I becoming increasingly paranoid?
Finally, it gives me great pleasure to say that Jin is definitely not dead, at least not in the classic sense, and I totally called it. His meeting a young, pregnant Danielle Rousseau screams NOT EVEN REMOTELY A COINCIDENCE to me, so I hope they get some good-quality screen time together before the next flash of light—unless, of course, his state of bizarre undeadness means that he doesn’t travel through time in the “normal” fashion, and he’s stuck in one time period alone—it just happens to be the wrong one. So what repercussions will his interacting with Danielle have on the future? What of the mysterious illness that we know will soon infect the rest of her crew? Will Jin’s condition protect him from that too? Should I just shut up now?
Sound bites
- “Hooray, everything’s back to normal.”—Miles, once Charlotte wakes up from another round of time-traveling nosebleeds and collapses into unconsciousness
- “Thank you, Lord!”—Sawyer, after a flash of white light rescues him and his rowing mates from the trigger-happy fellows pursuing them
- “I take that back!”—Sawyer, upon realizing that the flash of white light has landed them in the middle of a thunderstorm
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