After half a season with only a small handful of boring lines they then take away Sun's ability to speak English! However, for better or worse, I prefer Yunjin Kim's acting when it is in Korean. Her phrasing and cadence in English always feels stilted. Sun continues to be my least favorite surviving regular of the whole series.
I felt silly for not predicting the simple and obvious Sun-Jin-money-watch-Keamy story. It makes perfect sense and I liked it. The Watch ends up on Keamy's wrist, huh? Interesting. Makes me wonder if they had his character in mind when The Watch first appeared. (Was he officially dead when we left him?) Both The Watch and The Garden were nice Season One callbacks. Speakin' of watches...
Watch out for that tree! It was a really neat audio/visual/verbal trick to get the audience in the mode of hearing/reading Korean in the flash-sideways and then slipping it under the radar in the main timeline until Ben points out that Sun's speaking Korean.
I was happy to recognize Room 23 even before the film rolled. "Think about your life...We are the causes of our own suffering...Everything changes." A fun callback to Season Three. Ya know what else is a fun callback to Season Three? MIKHAIL!!! Yay! Yay! Hooray!! I'm so damn happy they brought him back and we get to see him lose his eye. Jin?! Sweet :) This almost makes up for the non-showing of the statue destruction.
Does anyone have a good theory on the significance of mirrors in the flash-sideways? Is it just some blatant suggestion that this is a mirror universe? Are these flash-sideways characters (or Sidies, as I now like to call them) Through the Looking Glass? What does that suggest for their origin and fate? Or is it The Island (Main Timeline) that's on the "other" side of the looking glass and the flash sideways is the "real" world? Smoke and mirrors...
The only way Locke can leave is if all remaining cave wall names are with him. He says there are three in the beach camp that he needs and Ilana says there are a total of six left. Locke claims Kate's name is no longer on the cave wall. Based on that it sounds like the six we're sposeta count are both Kwons, plus Reyes, Ford, Jarrah, and Shepherd.
So, Smokey can't go over water. That makes sense if an island in the middle of the Pacific was chosen as his prison. That makes it less certain that Smokey was responsible for the deaths of the 316'ers (though it's probably still him, imo). So the war is here, huh? OK. How long does it take to train an army? Four seasons, apparently.
Whatever Widmore's plan is it involves pockets of electromagnetism and Desmond (yay, Desmond's back).
I LOVED that Sayid stopped short of cutting Jin loose, opting instead to just put the razor in Jin's hand and leave him with a 'Good luck.' Beautiful. It defied audience anticipation of a Sayid & Jin adventure and was much more consistent with Sayid's general disposition (distrusting, laissez faire, survivalist).
My expectations were low going into this one and so it managed to exceed them. I liked the ep. Apart from the absence of Jacob they seemed to touch on every character in some way. Hopefully they'll be able to continue that trend without sacrficing depth.
There's only seven episodes left. I think it's a given that the finale (at least) will be telling the story of the whole cast. So whose stories will we get in the other six? There should be a Hurley ep. and a Des&Pen ep. That leaves four. Jacob? Smokey? Claire? Ilana? Widmore? It's very possible that Miles & Lapidus are gonna get left out. Can't wait to see it all tie together :)
Etceteratic Considerations
Re: Etceteratic Considerations
As far as remaining episode centricities, I think we'll get Desmond, Hurley, and Jack or Locke sideays stories, and hopefully a Jacob and MIB origin flashback. The way they left Sawyer's story dangling, we're likely to see more of that too. I'm starting to think that the sideways timeline will not be resolved until the finale.