"The Glass Ballerina"

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

FOCUS: JIN, SUN
EPISODE: 3.2
AIRED: OCTOBER 11, 2006

If you’re a Red Sox fan, or even a baseball fan in general, you have to love the final scene of “The Glass Ballerina” more than pretty much anything else on this show (unless you are a Yankee or Cardinal fan, in which case it probably pissed you off. To you I say – HAH!). Paying off Jack’s metaphor for people never changing: “That’s why the Red Sox will never win the World Series” (something that might have carried more weight if the episode aired before they DID, but whatever), Ben – who finally introduces himself formally here – proves to Jack that they have contact to the outside world by showing him a clip of the final play in Game 4, something I’ve probably watched 30 times in my life but got goose-bumps seeing it used in such an awesome way here. The look on Jack’s face is priceless; my only complaint is that he doesn’t ask Ben to let him watch the whole game.

It’s easily the best moment in an otherwise middling episode, where we STILL don’t know what happened to the Hatch, and have a backstory revealing that one of our most likeable characters is kind of a b---h (not broth). It’s like, OK, so as a little girl Sun let the poor maid get fired over something she did, fine. But then they reveal that she WAS indeed cheating on Jin with that Jae Lee dude, a revelation that only serves to create some drama about her pregnancy later in the season. Otherwise, I just don’t get what any of this serves? Just to make sure we understand that Sun wasn’t perfect either? Is it too much to ask that ONE of our characters wasn’t kind of a scumbag in the past? I could see if she was still seeing him and maybe getting too close, but they’re naked in bed together – the line is well past being crossed. Poor Jin. He beats folks to a pulp to earn her love and this is how she repays him.

Plus he never even finds out, thus he is deprived of the satisfaction of knowing that the guy who destroyed his nice car at least had it coming. Like, he’d be super-pissed, but seeing the guy go splat right in front of him would probably make him feel a little better. Now he’s just like “thanks a lot, random guy who I had no beef with, now I need a new car.” Again, poor Jin.

The Kate and Sawyer stuff is pretty good though. I don’t think I need to explain why I like these particular scenes with Kate so much, so I’ll let a screenshot do all the talking:

But Sawyer is in fine form here too; his reaction to Pickett’s suggestion that she take her dress off to work is priceless (“How dare you?”), and you have to applaud a guy who decides to gather intel on his captors by making out with a beautiful woman – best example of two birds with one stone ever. And while I’m totally on Jack’s side in the whole love triangle stuff, I must admit his “you taste like strawberries” line is better than anything Jack’s ever done. It also suggests she hasn’t brushed her teeth since the day before (when Ben had her over for breakfast), which tickles me for some reason.

Speaking of Ben, telling Jack it was just “a week ago” that he was the one being held captive was pretty weird – it had been what, 6-7 months for us? Hell even watching them back to back, he escaped more than a week ago for me. In fact, Season 3 in particular takes place over a very limited amount of time (3 weeks, I think?), which was always hard for me to wrap my brain around. 24 always got around this potential issue by flashing forward a year or two in between seasons (and replacing the entire cast save Jack and Chloe, more or less), but by now S2 was a distant memory for us. It’s also weird how good they were with continuity with some things, like Ben’s facial wounds, but totally gave up on others – Jin’s hair, for example, seems to grow at a Chia pet rate.

Tomorrow – we finally find out what happened at the Hatch! According to Lostpedia, it was supposed to be the season’s 2nd episode (and this would be the 3rd), but they swapped them for whatever reason. Yeah, because we were way more concerned with whether or not Sun, Jin, and Sayid accomplished anything with their little mission (answer: nope) than whether or not 3 of the most intriguing characters got blown up. Big difference between keeping us in suspense and just being dicks, Darlton.

Where are we?