LOST Recap

Not in Portland

Things pick up right where they were left in the "fall season finale": Jack has nicked Ben's kidney sac, causing bleeding that will kill him if Jack doesn't sew it back up within an hour, but he won't sew it back up unless the Others let Kate and Sawyer go. There's a problem, though - Pickett is about to shoot Sawyer's head off. Jack makes Kate promise that she'll run and call him on the radio when she's safe. When she calls him she's supposed to relay a story back to him that he told her on the day of the crash.

We open with Juliet sitting on a beach, holding a leather pouch of some kind and clearly upset about something. She goes inside and walks down a creepy hallway that has flashing florescent light fixtures. She must be in the DHARMA medical station. Things get creepier as Ethan Rom and his chipmunk cheeks pass her in the hall. Yes, she must be in the Caduceus station. She enters a room bathed in candlelight. She prepares to inject a woman with what's in the pouch. The woman is clearly ill, probably from cancer. Hey! It's Jane from Deadwood! The LOST writers must love that show as much as we do.

As they talk we find out that Juliet is treating this woman with injections and doing it without "his" knowledge, although we don't know at this point who "he" is, and that the woman is in fact Juliet's sister. And that they're in Miami! I swear I didn't realize this was a flashback. Tricky.

Back in the O.R., Juliet listens as Jack instructs Kate to take the walkie, Sawyer and get running. He's given her an hour's head start. Because Pickett is distracted with all of the walkie-talkie stuff, Sawyer is able to get the gun away from him. Sawyer lays a beating on Pickett, locks him and the other guy in the cage and he and Kate make a run for it. Yay!

In the O.R., Juliet tells Tom to go get Kate and Sawyer back, and if he has to, to kill them. Jack screams that he will kill Ben, but Juliet tells him no, he won't.

Flashback: Juliet sneaks into a Bio Research Lab at night. Well, she doesn't exactly sneak in - she has a security card - but she's skulking like someone who doesn't want to be seen. Juliet used to have curly hair. I guess they don't have rollers on the island. Anyway, she gets a call on her cell phone as she's skulking down the hall. It's from Dr. Alpert's office and he's calling to confirm their meeting the next day. You'd better turn your phone off, Juliet, or all the skulking in the world will do you no good.

Juliet is stealing vials of the drug that she is injecting her sister with, and as she's taking them from the fridge a man comes in with a much younger and much taller woman and they start to make out. Juliet hides behind something but guess who forgot to turn her phone off?? The man, Edmund, follows the ringing phone and finds her. He asks her why she's there and introduces her to his young friend. Edmund is Juliet's ex-husband. He also appears to be her boss. Not a good combo, if you ask me. She manages to come up with a lame reason for being in the lab and gets out of there before he can ask any more questions.

Operating Room: A clearly more confident, present-day Juliet tells Jack that Kate and Sawyer are not getting back to their side of the island because they are on a completely different island. (they're on a smaller island, 2 miles offshore) Oops. Jack looks to Tom, who's all, 'fraid so, dude. Jack strikes back at Juliet by revealing that she wanted Benry to die during the surgery and asked Jack to make it look like an accident. They start yelling at each other about it who's telling the truth and Tom tells them to shut up and Juliet to leave. One her way out the door, she tells Tom that Jack won't let a patient just die.

Pickett and friends are released from the cage and they start chasing after Kate and Sawyer. Kate and Sawyer make it to the beach, and realize they will need a boat to get to their island. Kate actually does the smart thing and walkie-talkies Jack and asks for a boat. He asks Tom how they can get off the island, but before he can get an answer out of him Pickett shows up and gets off a lucky shot, blowing the walkie out of Kate's hand and into a million pieces. There's a lot of running through the jungle. And some very bad shooting. Just as Kate is about to get shot, Alex (Rousseau's daughter) takes out the shooter with her trusty slingshot. Awesome. She tells them to follow her. There's more running until Alex hides them in a hole in the ground. Pickett and friends pass them by.

O.R.: Tom asks Jack if Juliet really asked him to kill Benry, and Jack says yes, it's true. Right then Benry wakes up (actually, I think he's been awake for a while). He asks to have Juliet brought to him.

Flashback: Juliet is summoned to Edmund's office by Sheri, the girl Edmund was sucking face with the night before and who is his new research assistant. He tells her he wants "in" on the medical experiments she's been conducting in private on her sister. He threatens her with an ethical/criminal violation if she doesn't let him take some of the credit. Seems Juliet has a history of getting walked all over by powerful men.

Other Island: Tom tells Juliet that Benry wants to see her. Elsewhere on the island, Alex tells Sawyer and Kate that she has a boat that they can use to get back to their island, but they have to help free her boyfriend Karl. Remember Karl? He's the kid that tried to escape from the zoo on Sawyer's first day there, but was caught and taken away by Pickett or Tom or somebody. How many days ago was that? 2?

By the way, Sawyer is crazy with the nicknames in this episode. Like a little too crazy.

In the O.R. - Benry and Jack have a little chat. Just as I thought, Benry's heard everything. Juliet comes in and he asks to speak with her alone. Jack leaves and watches them from the observation room, with Tom. We can't hear the conversation between Juliet and Benry. Tom hilariously introduces himself to Jack: "I'm Tom, by the way." It's a little too late for the niceties, Tom!

Juliet leaves the operating room and tells Jack to go back in and finish Benry's surgery. When Jack asks why he should that, she says because she's going to go help his friends escape. Tom is gobsmacked.

Flashback: Juliet is having her meeting with Dr. Alpert from Mittelos Bioscience. He shows her a slideshow of their offices in Portland, OR and it all looks really fake and creepy and 30 years old. Alpert tells Juliet that Mittleos is a privately funded company ,so they have a lot of freedom. He wants her to come work for them, leading a team of scientists. Mittelos is impressed with her work impregnating a male field mouse and he shows her x-rays of the prematurely withered womb of a 26 year old woman who could use her help. She tells him that she can't, that her ex-husband wouldn't let her, that the only way she could get away from him would be if he got hit by a bus. She leaves, her passive-aggressive work being done. As she leaves, she tells him that she's not a leader.

Island: Juliet strides into the video room and locates Sawyer, Kate and Alex on one of the monitors. She's disappointed at seeing that Alex is involved, too.

Kate, Sawyer and Alex approach an island building that is being guarded by Aldo, who is reading "A Brief History of Time". Not your average guard, I see. They awesomely fool him with the old "Wookie prisoner gag" and get inside, where they find Karl in a room, strapped onto a chair with big, glowing goggles on. (I forgot to mention that Alex also threatens Aldo with telling her father on him. Was she raised by Benry? Or was it someone higher up?) Karl's undergoing some kind of re-programming, being forced to watch a very weird video and listen to loud, crazy bongo music. Some of the phrases flashed on the screen:

Plant a good seed and your joy will gather fruit.
Everything Changes
We are the causes of our own suffering
God loves you as he loved Jacob
Think About Your Life

What it all means, I have no idea, but it's cool. I also heard that if you play a portion of the "music" backwards, you clearly hear a voice that says, "only fools are enslaved by time and space". (sorry I don't have a link to the wav file at this time, but I did hear it on the radio so it must be true!) "Mittelos" is an anagram for "lost time". Are these hints, perhaps about another of the DHARMA experiments? Could some of these experiments have affected Desmond and is that why he's seeing the future?

Digression, I'm sorry...Flashback: Juliet comes home, where her sister is now living with her. Her sister tells her that the treatment worked and that she's pregnant. Again, I ask the question: why would a woman who is very sick with cancer go to such extremes to get pregnant? I hope things get explained further some day.

Cut to the bastard ex-husband who is walking along a sidewalk and talking on his cell, telling the person on the other end they are "insufferable" and "mean". He's talking to his mother, of course. Ha! Juliet approaches him, tells him that Rachel is pregnant and he's trying to convince her to publish her results wehn... BAM! He is hit by a freakin' bus. The Passive-Agrgessive Express. And while I should have seen it coming, it scared the shit out of me.

O.R.: As Jack finishes the operation, he asks Tom why, if they can get off the island, they didn't get help for Benry and take him to a facility? Tom begins to answer him, saying "Because, ever since the sky turned purple --", but he's interrupted by a geyser of blood squirting from inside of Benry somewhere. Jack has nicked an artery (by mistake this time).

Kate, Sawyer, Alex and Karl find the boat, one of the sail-canoes, but Pickett finds them as they're loading Karl onto it. Just as he's about to shoot Sawyer, Juliet comes out of nowhere and shoots Pickett dead. Finally. God that guy was annoying.

While Jack enlists Tom to help save Benry's life, Juliet lets everyone on the beach go, except for Alex, telling her that the only way her father would let Karl go is if Alex stayed.

Jack is trying desperately to save Benry. Kate calls on the walkie talkie. She tells him that Juliet is letting them go, they have a boat and they're safe. He needs her to tell him the story he told her on the beach that first day. The story calms him and helps him fix Benry. But while she tells the story it's obvious to Sawyer and everyone else that there's still a connection between Kate and Jack.

Jack makes Kate promise never to come back for him and turns the walkie talkie off.

Sawyer, Kate and Karl paddle away as Juliet and Alex watch.

Flashback: Juliet is viewing Edmund's body in the morgue, where she breaks down, crying.

O.R.: The surgery is finished, and Jack was able to remove the tumor.. He suggests to Juliet that she do a biopsy to see if it's malignant. He asks her what Benry said that made her want to save his life...flashback to Juliet crying in the morgue. In one of the most inappropriate recruiting maneuvers ever, Alpert and a very jowly Ethan approach her. She kind of starts to put together two and two with the whole hit by a bus thing, but Alpert slimes his way out of that and tells her that they really want her to come work for them. She asks if she can take her sister with her, but he says the site is too remote, not in Portland, exactly.

Back to the O.R.: Juliet tells Jack that she's been on the island for 3 years, two months and 28 days and that Benry told her that if she let him live and helped Jack, Benry would finally let her go home. So she is being held against her will, too.

Tonight: Kate doesn't listen to Jack and launches a rescue mission and Desmond is stilling seeing things!