Yeah, you go ahead and grimace Jacob. You’re grimacing like I am, at the uneven quality of this week’s LOST. There were some totally radical moments, and then there were some really unsubtle and painful scenes, where the dialogue made me go, wtf, no seriously? I can’t tell if I totally like the mundane action of LA X, or if it is lulling me to sleep in the middle of epic Island adventuring.

Hurley is the stud of this show right now. Almost every scene he is in, I’m totally digging on. Our portly fellow continues to mix together hilarious metacommentary on the show itself with other witty comments:

You ever try to get Jack to do something? It’s like impossible. I can just go myself…Okay, it’s bad enough you already made me write down way too much, and I just lied to a samurai.

Awesome. I love how they continue to have Hurley act as the mouthpiece for almost everything the viewer is thinking. I mean, Jesus Christ, c’mon Jacob! Everyone knows that Jack, along with everyone else on the Island are bunch of obstinate assholes, who listen to no one and only do what they please. It’s amusing to hear it out loud.

Claire is romping through the jungle with Jin and drags him back to her hut of depravity. There is something really creepy going on with Jack’s half-sister. Be it her shitty hair, or the skeleton-baby in her crib, or the fact that she’s burying hatchets in dudes, yeah, something’s up.

What is up?

Don’t you remember!

She’s infected!

With what?

AN INFECTION, DUMMY.

The big reveal at the end of the episode is that her friend that she kept referencing throughout the episode was the Man in Black. The double-twist that really wrinkled the ole proverbial testicles was that she knew he wasn’t Locke. Oh. Snap. Claire walked off with the MiB back at the end of Season Four when he was rockin’ out as her Dad. And now it seems that she’s totally down with Smokey. Interesting.

I really want to know how Claire and Sayid became infected with the infection, since I assume that once they’ve become engulfed in it they’re under Smokey’s power, and do this a lot:

Damn.

So yeah, Claire is batshit crazy and working with the Man in Black. She’s hellbent on getting Aaron back, and I’m all like, uh, bitch, you fucking left him two seasons ago! Maybe if you hadn’t wandered off into the forest in the dead of night with the specter of your father, you wouldn’t be trying to desperately to find him. Just saying. I mean, I know that there are many philosophies regarding parenting, most of which involve leaving your kid in front of a TV or video game console and then complaining when they grow up to get drunk in the woods and spend all damn day on the Tweeterbook or whatever. But I’m just going to go out and condemn the “Abandon Your Baby And Vanish Into the Forest” approach.

I can already hear the groans of people expecting more from the LA X dimension. I know this because I had two friends groaning on my futon last night about how fucking boring the storylines set there are. I’m trying really hard to enjoy them,  because I figure there has to be some value to them. Right? I mean, please?

This week we get to see Jack the Shitty Dad. Over the course of the twenty minutes allocated to LA X, we watch Jack as he tries his hand at parenting, realizes he’s becoming OMFG, just like his own father, and makes solid with his kid. I can see where they’re going thematically. They want to show you what would have been different, et cetera, et cetera. Or rather, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, what works on paper as a neat concept – show the viewers the banal existence they would have suffered had they not landed on the Island!, is just sort of boring in execution.

This is the sort of stuff that interests me on LA X; shit like Jack not remembering when he had his appendix removed in that timeline, and myself quietly begging that it has something to do with an overlapping with the Oceanic 815-Crashed timeline. I hold my breath hoping that LA X plays out more than a sterile drama, and in my darkest moments, I begin to worry it won’t.

Yo, we get it. At first all the books they were dropping in the show that had allusions to the plot were cool. But it’s like they’re just smashing us in the face with their themes. I mean, last week Al Bundy’s wife tells Locke outright, “Maybe it’s destiny! Destiny! Do you get it? Destiny!” and this week we’re handling Alice in Wonderland. RABBIT HOLES OMFG I GET IT.

Ah, the Lighthouse. I mean, c’mon. If you didn’t think this part was rad, you’re a fucking asshole. Or maybe you’re just not a fanboy like me. But Jacob, much like God, has been watching over all of the candidates throughout their entire lives. Every candidate is assigned a number, and corresponds with a point on the wheel that rotates the mirror. Am I wrong in assuming there are 360 degrees, and consequently, 360 candidates on the wheel?

Of course Jack is impetuous as fuck, as ever, and after finding himself on the wheel, goes banana-shit crazy and demands they put the dial on his number. It reveals his old-ass house and he’s all butthurt because Jacob has been watching him take craps and suffer throughout his entire life. Then Jack decides to beat up a helpless mirror, and trash Jacob’s sweet voeyeur device.

Everyone on the fucking Island is so impulsive and hard-headed, and it is infuriating to watch their stupidity sometimes. You just know they’re going to fuck everything up. Of course Jack has to make with the breaking of the lighthouse mirror, of course. Because he’s an asshole, like everyone else on that plane.

That shit is rad though. C’mon. There’s a mysterious lighthouse with a mirror that allows Jacob to peer into the lives of those he had chosen as candidates. It’s creepy, and it continues to make me wonder how these people were dubbed worthy of being candidates.

I’m going to ignore the bad line about having to let Jack look out at the ocean to figure out his destiny and just fawn over Jacob’s interaction with Hurley towards the end of the episode. I really dig on Jacob’s nonchalance towards whatever happens on the Island. The guy has been stabbed and thrown into a firepit, and he still exudes a peacefulness that I can dig. It all carries over from his initial conversation, where he  makes it known that he believes the human spirit will persevere. Guy has faith in everything working out, and even if it doesn’t, I can respect his optimism.

He is a man with a plan, and it don’t matter if you smash his lighthouse “into a billion pieces”.

When Jacob tells Hurley that he needed to get Jack and him away from the Temple, I was like, here we go, fuck, they’re going to run off to the Temple like assholes. But Jacob drops the bomb that they’re too late already, and I was totally stoked. Man in Black is going to tear some shit up at the Temple, and for once, the assholes running around the Island aren’t going to be boneheaded and run towards danger.

Next week, hopefully MiB tears up Dogen’s samurai ass (paging Freud), and Jack stops being emo and finally realizes he has to kick some ass. Remember Shephard, brother, ain’t nothing irreversible. Just because you’ve totally blown as a leader and ruined lives, you still got a chance at redemption.

Or at least give me more Hurley.

Tags: LOST, LOST - Lighthouse