"The Little Prince"

JANUARY 6, 2011

FOCUS: KATE (SORT OF)
EPISODE: 1.4
AIRED: FEBRUARY 4, 2009

Man, what a polarizing episode. On the one hand, Evangeline Lilly has never looked more beautiful than she does in “The Little Prince” – the lady cleans up good. On the other, you have the most annoying scene in the entire series run (including any other scenes I’ve made the same claim for – my memory sucks): when our heroes are getting shot at by the occupants of another outrigger, a group that is never identified in any way. So I’m at a loss.

Actually it doesn't matter, because as a whole it's just a filler episode, with the folks both on and off the island mostly just traveling from one place to another and not really doing much. There’s a really nice moment with Kate and Jack, when he says that Aaron is his family too (dude, if not for the pressing matters, she would have jumped the shit out of the good doctor right then and there). I also like the scene where Sawyer sees Kate delivering Claire’s baby (why he didn’t just ignore Daniel and run over saying “hey don’t believe that Henry dude he’s lying!” or something else of use, I don’t know), and I like how Juliet has seemingly gained power over Sawyer (she tells him to shut up and go away, and he does! Doesn’t even call her anything), but really the entire episode is just a bunch of driving or walking around.

Even the big moment in the show – the reunion of the Oceanic Six – doesn’t actually happen! They leave it as a cliffhanger, which is the rare instance of the show being hurt by watching them back to back. At least when they aired, there was some suspense to the ending, because they seemed to be hinting that Sun was planning to kill them or something, but now we know she doesn’t, so the episode just sort of stops and we have to wait until tomorrow to find out what she does (nothing). And as much as I love fighting and action scenes, I’m pretty goddamn sick of seeing dudes trying and failing to kill Sayid. Like, of all the six, why is he the only one that ever gets assassins after him? Why can’t some dude try to kill Jack at the liquor store or something?

I’ve also (re) had it up to here with the time travel flashes. Maybe if there was some sort of system to them – every hour, or every time someone says “Fluffernutter” – anything but “OK here would be a good spot to flash again, because we’ve written ourselves into a hole” (or a character would have enough time to reveal something that they were trying to hide from us, i.e. when Locke and Richard were talking). The random times don’t make much sense either – they go to the 50s, the 70s, a few days ago, the future... no pattern whatsoever. Daniel compared it to a record skipping, but if the record skips it stays in one spot and has a weird rhythm to it – it doesn’t just go all around the record like some sort of needle-based asshole.

The “resurrection” of Jin is pretty good though. Again, I’m confused why he doesn’t go to the same time periods as everyone else (unless he just slept through all of the previous flashes?). But I like that he is found by Danielle – a nice little twist that I didn’t see coming. I also appreciated that they didn’t try dragging out the “Jin is dead” nonsense for too long; 4 episodes is fine I guess. Especially considering how long they drag out his separation from Sun; it’s actually lightning quick in comparison.

Eh, the season as a whole is just a bunch of hooey until Jack and the rest get back on the island, in my opinion. If you look at the whole series as one movie, this would be the portion where I’d go check my email or make a sandwich or something.

Where are we?