Last night's 'Lost': Dharmistice

Last night's 'Lost': Dharmistice

The post below discusses Wednesday's "Lost" episode, "LeFleur."

I was ambivalent about last week's Locke-centric episode of "Lost."

But I loved this week's episode so much I think I want to marry it.

There were a couple flaws in "LeFleur": It wasn't seven hours long, and there was no Pierre Chang/Edgar Halliwax/Marvin Candle. In every other way, though -- I loved it.

Last week was Christmas for Locke fans. This week was Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah all in one for us Dharma nerds. I'm super-tired right now, so forgive the lack of in-depth analysis or anything else that resembles coherent thought (I stayed up too late to watch the episode a second time).

But let me list everything I dug about "LeFleur":

We got a glimpse of the ancient statue that the four-toed foot remnant probably belonged to. The four-toed foot statue! Yessss! We got a competitive snarkfest between Sawyer and Miles. Yesss! (Running from Point A to Point B through the jungle -- "It's the only plan you people have," Miles opined. Dude, you don't even know the half of it.) We got glimpses of a shaky truce between the Dharma Initiative and the Others. We got glimpses of Sawyer -- sorry, Jim LeFleur -- as head of the DI's security detail, for heaven's sake. How in the heck did that happen? In any case, I had to love the sheriff's star on his jumpsuit. We got some wonderfully emotional scenes as well -- there was amazing work from Jeremy Davies as the grieving Daniel Faraday, who was distraught to the point of numbness over the death of poor Charlotte. Then the look on his face when he glimpsed a very young Charlotte -- heartbreaking. And we got to see a romance between Sawyer and Juliet, which was very sweet. (Something of a caveat: I have to say I wasn't super excited to see Kate meet up with Sawyer again in the final scene. Now there will probably be some weird love Kate-Sawyer-Jack-Juliet quadrangle and my feelings on seeing that play out are decidedly meh. I'd much rather see more of what we saw tonight -- Sawyer and Juliet and the gang with the DI old-schoolers, but I guess we're done with that now. Waaah.) (Side note for "Battlestar" fans -- I saw some parallels between the situation of Galen Tyrol on "BSG" and Sawyer on "Lost." Both had their hearts set on one woman, but when she appeared to be gone, they went with the best available option, a person for whom they had actual feelings, but it was not quite the same.)   Kudos to Josh Holloway for doing some great work in this episode. Throughout Sawyer's speech to Horace, we knew it was a lie -- Sawyer was trying to convince himself that he'd forgotten Kate, which was clearly untrue. And the look on his face when he saw her again was moving. As Alan Sepinwall has said, the Kate that Sawyer is in love with (sort of the Platonic ideal of Kate that Sawyer has in his mind) is often more interesting than the actual Kate we see on the show. Did I mention, we saw Sawyer -- Sawyer! -- as part of the Dharma Initiative? That's just crazy. In a good way. There's a Dharma garage, with multiple VW vans. And Juliet can fix them! We saw Sawyer face down Richard Alpert! Alpert is normally the one who holds all the cards in any given situation, so seeing him get flummoxed by everything Sawyer knew about Locke and Jughead was pretty sweet. We heard Sawyer describe Alpert as "your buddy out there with the eyeliner." I did mention how much I loved the snarkage, right? Here's some snarkage of my own (it's so minor, but I had to point this out): Wasn't it handy how they didn't show us how the Sawyer group buried the dead Others? Surely with no tools that would have taken hours and left them covered in dirt. Or not, I guess.  We got a glimpse of Kevin Rankin ("Friday Night Lights") and Patrick Fischler ("Mad Men") as Phil and Jerry, Dharma security guys. Awe. Some. Security guard movies and TV shows appear to be all the rage these days. Why not a Phil and Jerry spinoff? We saw more of Horace, who had a faintly creepy cult-leader vibe mixed in with his hippie-ish vibe. Maybe he's a good guy, but honestly, why is he forcing everyone to wear jumpsuits? Did I mention that I loved this episode?

Now for the questions it left us with:

What happened to make Juliet stay? Was she powerless when Sawyer set his dimples to stun? How did Sawyer end up as the head of security? Was his adept handling of Alpert merely the start of his ascent to a position of power? We know later there was a purge on the Island and most of the DI was killed by the Others. What brought that about? Did Sawyer, Miles, Daniel and Juliet being in the DI in any way help set in motion what happened later, or was the purge/massacre simply (as we saw in "The Man Behind the Curtain") a result of Ben's rage and Alpert's desire to take over? Who did Amy give birth to? It has to be someone we met, right? Were Amy and her husband Paul attacked for straying on to the Others' turf? Were they really just there to have a picnic or was something else going on? How will I make it through two weeks without another "Lost" installment (there's no new "Lost" next week)?

Lastly, I won't say what the guest-star list is for the next episode, which airs March 18, but it's making me koo-koo-krazy to see that outing. Is it March 18 yet?

Your thoughts?

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