Jack Shephard: You have a few questions? Well so do we.
This week: even an atomic bomb can’t make Kate’s backstory interesting.
I. Alternate Reality Kate Is Just Kate Without Men To Sleep With (Yet)
A. If all the extra screen time for Alternate Reality Arzt (ARzt?) doesn’t end with him still, somehow, getting blown to pieces by dynamite, I am going to be extremely disappointed.
B. I know Claire is a stranger in a strange land (callbacks!) and she doesn’t quite know how to act around a suspiciously attractive armed fugitive, but if the fat cabbie/puppeteer from Heroes can outplay you and outrun you on the streets of L.A., then it’s better that you don’t get out of the cab.
C. I like that a stuffed whale and a MySpace-caliber Polaroid were enough to convince Kate to eschew her master plan of fleeing the city. Curse that good heart of hers! Nevermind the still-there alternate reality history of killing an innocent man, robbing a bank, getting your childhood love killed or drugging your husband. She wants to make sure this sweet young foreigner with a poor understanding of how to pack a carryon doesn’t have to ride the bus! I should forget all those mean things I think about her!
D. “Oh wow, look, I’m just a young, blonde, newly-single woman whose partner left her. There’s no way I can raise a BABY, I can’t imagine ANYONE having to undertake that kind of burden without a pre-existing support system. Enjoy your flight back to New Zealand or wherever.”
E. Hey, I don’t know how A.P.B.’s work in exotic Brentwood, California, but when a felon escapes in an airport (obviously making her a TERRORIST, or something) and continues to drive the same cab she escaped in well into the afternoon, someone should be running that license plate! Hey, maybe the cop cars at the hospital have bigger priorities, such as driving too slow through the E.R. access lanes. Is Ana Lucia the sheriff of Orange County in this new reality?
F. Here, take my credit card. It’s from a bank in another country, but no biggie. Feel free to rack up the kind of debt that I, a soon-to-be single mother currently in the middle of putting off her responsibilities for as long as I can, will be able to pay off. Thanks for the cab ride.
II. It’s Always Sunny In Otherdelphia
A. The de-evolution of Sawyer into the angry, pained loner is fascinating, but I won’t believe it until he cuts his hair back into the mullet.
B. When they said all the extra security measures weren’t to keep the Lostaways in, they weren’t kidding. Sawyer walked out the front door and didn’t even deactivate the security code or unlock the deadbolt. He totally satellite-phoned it in and Red Temple Squad spent even less energy convincing him to stay.
C. I know Jack ‘fessed up to not really saving Sayid’s life later on, but when Sayid first said thanks, why didn’t anyone mention Hurley? The poor guy (now with Leadership Role action!) sat with Sayid next to the van, then spearheaded the movement to get him to the temple. For extra credit, when The Others drowned Sayid, he was the only person who said “you are drowning him!” instead of “uh, whut?” At least give the guy a little tip of the hat.
D. Since Mac clearly remembers his own history on the Island, how did he end up getting promoted to Red Temple Squad? His claim to fame was losing Karl from the brainwashing facility in Room 23, and while three years or so have gone by since that mishap, it’s gotta be pretty hard to live down. How many prisoners do they get, usually? Barring a catastrophic plane crash, maybe one every 6-8 months? Losing one and not being shot to death in the process is a big deal. These are the people who got up Locke’s ass because he wouldn’t KILL HIS DAD. I just feel like it’s something that should still come up during Mac’s performance review. Although maybe he got promoted because of he’s on the Straight Talk Express and doesn’t leave the phrase “from the smoke monster” off of the sentence “we are protecting you from the smoke monster.”
E. Kate always thinks very highly of herself, but throwing around guarantees was probably going a little too far. Oh, you’re positive that you can convince Sawyer to return and stay? Just like you were positive he’d give you Shannon’s asthma medicine? Or the Haliburton case with the toy airplane in it? Or his spot on the raft leaving the Island? Or that he needed to stop Jack from detonating the bomb? Or that you were happy for he and Juliet?
F. I don’t know if Dogen is a certified trainer, but someone should tell him that this exists before he goes looking for a patent on his crank-and-shock ab treatment.
G. Don’t blame Sayid for flunking the “test” they ran. If someone blew ash on me, electrocuted me and then stuck me with a hot poker, I’d have a little darkness in me, too. If the test fails because he gets all confused when you cause him pain with no explanation, that sounds an awful lot like telling if someone’s a witch by throwing them into the water and OH WAIT, YOU DID THAT ALREADY.
H. I will give one thing to Kate: she recognizes dummy trails like a mofo. Everyone on the damn Island hits the woods and turns into a Green Beret, but she’s always the Greener Beret (more economically friendly) and points out the real trail within, like, two sniffs.
I. Sayid gets awfully weepy about being tortured despite following most of his introductions in the past four years with “I am a torturer.” Sooner or later, the bully is gonna get bullied, dude, you just have to take it. Couple that with the fact that he hasn’t murdered anyone (adults or children) since his resurrection, and it’s pretty clear that this new pansy isn’t the real Sayid.
J. Division of labor at Red Temple Squad is a complete mystery to me. The guy at the top of the mountain speaks only Japanese, but he’s also the guy in charge of the Magic (sometimes) Healing Pool sponsored by Diet Dr. Pepper, the guy who electrocutes people to tell if they are Communists or not, and the temple pharmacist. His trusty sidekick Spectacles is in charge of one-way translations, and even then he seems to miss a word here and there (and get awfully fascinated each time, too – “drats, Japan, ya stumped me again!”). Flight attendant Cindy is in charge of day care service. Everyone else just holds guns and (in case of emergency) sprinkles ash. Ya’ll best call George Clooney because someone needs to fly in here (excuse me, ‘be brought here,’ am I right, Dogie-Doges? Wink-wink-nudge-nudge) and start cutting jobs.
K. I hope that the great magic trick they did with the mystery ankh in Hurley’s guitar case (“is your card the ACE OF HEARTS?!?! *surprised applause from Red Temple Squad*) also included a footnote of something like, “remember to tell Shephard the opposite of whatever you want him to do.” You don’t need to be an omniscient ghost God superbeing to understand how Jack operates, and if you guys know that his sister is Claire and that she’s gone off the French end, you know that HE NEVER DOES WHAT ANYONE TELLS HIM TO DO.
L. Two weeks, two karate attacks from Dogen. I think we know what somebody did at his audition.
M. Poison works whether or not you take it willingly, which is why it’s called “a poisoning” and not “a suicide.” Willing self-poisonings sound like the work of cults, so don’t get snippy because Sayid didn’t take your morning after pill and now he’s all preggers with smoke babies.
N. “Here’s a genius plan to find purpose to my otherwise-worthless fugitive life: I’m going to find my way back on to the inescapable Island that served as my living prison for about a year or so, then RE-ESCAPE from the inescapable Island, this time with a checked bag that includes a woman whose baby I delivered but with whom I otherwise wasn’t very close! It’s like I’m saving MY mom, except my mom is actually still alive and she hates me.”
O. Look, I can tell that you really loved Juliet because of the way you never use the word “love” when mourning her, and the way you talk about convincing her to stay so you won’t be alone and not because of any feelings you had for her, and the way you looked at the other woman every time someone else mentioned love back when everyone was alive. I am very, very said that your impending marriage of convenience is suddenly much less convenient. But don’t throw away that ring, you idiot! You bought that thing at 1977 prices! Do you know what kind of appreciation that thing has seen in the 30 years since? Surely a guy who used to sleep on top of a stash of mystery pills can understand the value of flipping something like that for cash, right?
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