"Two For The Road"

NOVEMBER 13, 2010

FOCUS: ANA LUCIA
EPISODE: 2.20
AIRED: MAY 3, 2006

Lost had another break between “S.O.S.” and “Two For The Road”, but man oh man did it come back with a bullet. Three of them, actually, as it ends with the 2nd biggest “Holy shit!” moment in the show’s run (1st being the reveal of the flash-forward). Man, it was such a shock I didn’t even have time to cheer for Ana Lucia’s death, which I had assumed I would do for pretty much the entire season. And then when poor Libby comes in and takes two to the chest as well – well shit, my jaw still hasn’t recovered.

Part of what makes it work so well is that it’s a pretty typical episode of Lost so far; there’s two main stories, one much lighter than the other. In the light one, Hurley is attempting to take Libby on a proper date, and thus he wants to take her on a picnic, but he blunders pretty much everything. First he seeks a radio from Sayid so he can pull a Lloyd Dobler (Sayid’s reaction to this entire thing is amazing), only to get the location of a secluded and romantic beach instead. But he can’t find it, and ends up getting them lost, only to discover their own beach (“Look, there’s Jin!” kills me every time). And then Libby inquires about blankets and drinks, both of which he forgot. So it’s really his fault she died, if you think about it. Either way – it’s pretty much the worst picnic ever (his faux pas about getting her drunk didn’t help). Poor Hurley.

The main story is, of course, more serious, as Ben tries to kill Ana Lucia (who can blame him?), which triggers a flashback about Ana running away after killing the dude who shot her. It’s one of the few times where a character’s flashback episode was a direct continuation of their previous flashback episode (it starts the next day after the events seen in “Collision”), which was pretty interesting dramatically, I think. Plus it was just nice to not have to try to figure out where it fell in their personal timeline, something that characters like Jack and Sawyer suffered from throughout the show.

Speaking of Jack, we get more Christian here! And even that has a pretty obvious connection to other flashbacks – we see the bulk of his drinking binge that ended with him at a bar with Sawyer (we even see Sawyer, briefly, on his way into said bar). It’s a little contrived, admittedly, but they make for an interesting pair, and it also hints at something that wouldn’t be revealed for a while (that Claire was his daughter). The more I think about it, the more I believe that they had all of the characters pre-Island lives mapped out better than the Island stuff; story threads were often introduced quite long before they were explained in the flashbacks, whereas on the island you just get a lot of out of nowhere shit like Nikki and Paulo.

Also, it’s a bit of a throwaway moment in the episode as a whole, but Jack apologizing to Locke and admitting he was wrong is pretty huge. Jack’s stubbornness would be one of his more prominent characteristics, so these rare moments where he admits fault for anything are always pretty eye-opening. And to LOCKE, of all people! Of course, they start arguing like 30 seconds later, but oh well, it was nice while it lasted. I also dug Jack pulling a gun on Sawyer, though the moment kind of confused me – I thought Jack’s gun WAS Ana Lucia’s? So she gave it to him and then gave Sawyer a distraction lay to steal his? Why hadn’t Jack just given it back to her beforehand? He’s usually pretty good about these things.

One side note – in this scene, Sawyer is reading "Bad Twin", the tie-in novel written by Gary Troup, one of the now-dead passengers. Jack tosses the book in the fire, so Sawyer never gets to read the last 10 pages, but if I recall correctly, he isn’t missing much. Not only was the book kind of shitty anyway, but it was also rather confusing – it was written by a passenger, but the book seemed to take place in the Lost-verse, as the Widmores and Hansos were in it. Why would he be writing about real people for his fictional book? Too many layers, but the book wasn’t good enough to use up brain cells trying to figure it out. Incidentally, I read it on a plane.

Where are we?