"Something Nice Back Home"

DECEMBER 26, 2010

FOCUS: JACK
EPISODE: 4.10
AIRED: MAY 1, 2008

(Note - I skipped Christmas. Happy Holidays!)

Sometimes I wonder why Lost’s creators were always so hell-bent on awkwardly withholding information from the audience for 30 seconds or so. “Something Nice Back Home”, Jack and Kate are now together, but they try to hide it from us for a few moments, even slightly disguising Kate’s voice when Jack talks to her in the shower. Why go to the trouble? It’s not as annoying as disguising Ben in “The Economist”, but it still seems like a giant waste of limited time.

The episode is actually pretty full of little moments that either delight or irk me. Perhaps it’s because I find the appendix subplot to be insanely pointless that I focus on the details on this one more than usual. For example, there’s a quick scene with Keamy and his men almost catching Sawyer, only for Frank to help ward them off. Good scene, but why are so many of Keamy’s men still alive? Didn’t the smoke monster take these guys out? Leaving Keamy alive is OK (and preferable), but the fact that there are like 3 other guys still up and about and one just injured makes the smoke monster seem incompetent.

I’m also somewhat confused by Jack’s behavior in the episode. Three episodes (so also, three days) ago he kissed Juliet quite passionately, yet here he’s 100% pro-Kate, demanding she be there during his surgery even though he has to know by now how worthless she is in such situations. It’s almost like his flash forwards are warping his mind in the present. “No, I want Kate there, because of the time we had hot sex after I read to Aaron.”

It’s also an episode that could very easily be the cause of a lot of folks’ confusion about “Lost Heaven”. There’s a scene in the flash forward where Hurley posits that they are all dead and in Heaven, because everything is too perfect. Now, that’s pretty much exactly what the flash sideways were about, but this scene really DID happen, as the flash sideways took place in some undetermined, metaphysical future where they were all dead (from old age or whatever). I recently discovered my wife thought all of the flash forwards were part of purgatory, and I’m sure she’s not the only one – this certainly didn’t help my explanation.

But it’s got some great moments too, like Jin’s awesome dressing down of Charlotte. It’s rare Jin got to display his badass side on the island, as it seemed to soften him, so this was a great way to let him be “dark” but still very much sympathetic and heroic. Also, not being a woman, I didn’t know that Daniel liked her either, so that was nice. Likewise, I enjoyed her little (possibly meta) line about “adding it to the list” when there’s a question we never got an answer to.

And since I always complain about the guest stars being spoiled by the credits, I have to admit that the listing of John Terry for a brief appearance near the end worked for once. Because it was a Jack episode (not Claire or whoever), it made sense that he’d be there somewhere, and it was fun trying to figure out how. I’m still not sure about the logistics – we know now he was seen on the island via the smoke monster, who couldn’t leave, so how did he appear to Jack? Guess Jack was just legit seeing things. But also, Claire walks off with “her dad”, which meant we’d be seeing him again soon. I always wished they would add him as a regular on the show. Love that guy.

Where are we?