LOST: Episode 5.04

The Little Prince

Episodes that have centered on either Jack or Kate or any combination thereof have never been my favorites. They seem repetitive to me, like they're telling the same story again and again, about how Jack needs to fix everything and Kate likes to run away from her problems, and neither of them seems to grow beyond those core issues. So I wasn't really all that jazzed when I found out that this episode featured them prominently. Much to my delight, however, the "The Little Prince" followed the structure of all season 5 episodes so far, with the story being split between the O6 in L.A. and the gang back on the island, making the Jack/Kate stuff much more bearable. It's a testament to how good this season is that even the Jack and Kate episodes are good.

To recap:

O6 in L.A.

Not much really happened, actually. Jack patches up Sayid, and while Jack is pulled away from the room to be dressed down for coming back to the hospital after he was suspended, Sayid awesomely deflects another attacker. He finds a slip of paper with Kate's address on it in the bad guy's pocket. Hurley calls Jack to check on Sayid and to let them know he was in jail and safe from Ben.

At Sun's suggestion, Kate visits the lawyer and proposes a deal: let me know who your client is and I'll let you take my blood. Lawyer says no deal. Jack tracks Kate down to tell her that bad guys are after her, and together they follow the lawyer, who is meeting with the client in question. The woman he meets with is Claire's mother, and it would make sense that she would be looking to take custody of her grandson, but as it turns out, she doesn't even know Aaron exists. So who hired the lawyer to go after Kate?

Just as I thought, it was Ben who hired the attorney, probably in order to give Kate a reason to run back to the island she wanted so badly to leave.  He's probably also behind Clarie's mom's presence in L.A. somehow.  The lawyer tells Ben that Hurley won't be charged with murder and will be released the next morning.

We end their part of the story on a pier in L.A., with Sun in a car with a gun and Aaron asleep in the back seat, and she's watching Ben, Jack, Kate and Sayid, and she has murder in her eyes. Don't do it, Sun!

On the Island

Charlotte recovers from her fainting spell and nose hemorrhage.  When asked by Juliet to explain what was happening to Charlotte, Daniel compares the effect to "mental jet lag".  Juliet thinks there's more to it than that, and so do I.  The group - Locke, Sawyer, Juliet, Daniel, Charlotte and Miles - spend the episode making their way to The Orchid station.  Locke believes, for unexplained reasons, that in order to fix things, the O6 need to return and they need to go to The Orchid for that to happen.  He tells Sawyer that the O6 are not dead and that they need to go to the beach to get Daniel's Zodiac and then use it to go around to the other side of the Island, which is where The Orchid is.  While on their hike to the beach, another time flash occurs, and when Sawyer goes off to investigate some off-screen screaming, he finds PastKate delivering PastClaire's baby.  He watches the scene with immense longing, until another flash comes and Kate and Claire disappear.  The hiking resumes, and Miles suffers a nosebleed. Uh-oh.

When they get to the beach, they find that their old camp has returned, except now it appears to have been long-abandoned, with no Rose or Bernard or Vincent in sight.  Could Locke's group be in the future now?  The Zodiac is gone, but there is one of those Hawaiian canoes with the long rail alongside it - you know, like from the beginning of Hawaii Five-O! - presumably left there by the people who took the Zodiac.  Inside the canoe, Sawyer finds an Ajira Airways water bottle.  Hmm.  They decide to take the canoe to The Orchid.  While out on the open water, someone shoots at them.  The shooters are in a boat, but are too far away to be identified.  As the shooters get closer to the canoe, time flashes again, this time depositing them at night, in the middle of a thunder storm.  They paddle to the shore, where Juliet suffers a nosebleed.  Ack!  Charlotte discovers some wreckage on the beach, wreckage with French writing on it...

A raft carrying a bunch of Frenchies floats out in the storm.  They spy a body floating on a piece of wood nearby.  It's Rousseau!  Right?  Well, that's what I thought, until they got closer and I could see it was clearly a man, but even then, I had no idea who it really was..Just imagine my surprise and delight when they rolled him over and it was Jin.  JIN!  I am so, so happy he is alive!  Not only because it's sad if he's dead, but also because now we have an awesome Sun/Jin reunion to look forward to.  If Sun doesn't muck it up and kill the rest of the O6, that is.

As you could expect, in the final scene the only female Frenchie on the raft introduces herself to Jin as Danielle Rousseau.  Yay!

Thoughts/Questions:

• Who keeps attacking Sayid?  It's Widmore's men, right?  Not Ben's?
• Who do you think was shooting at the canoe?  I was thinking it was the O6.  That they had all taken an Ajira Airways flight to some Pacific destination and made their way to the Island somehow...but why would they be shooting at Locke's group?  Wouldn't they be looking for them?
• I think they intentionally give Michael Emerson the most mundane dialogue just so they can hear how well he delivers it:  "He's my lawyer."
• Since Charlotte found pretty recent French wreckage, I would assume that her group and Jin are currently in the same timeline, and have probably even been sharing the same time jumps all along.  Jin wouldn't have noticed any time differences because he's been passed out on a floating piece of wood in the middle of the ocean.  I hope they find him soon.
• The order of nosebleeds is:  1) Charlotte, 2) Miles and 3) Juliet.  If the person who has been on the island the longest gets affected first, then I bet Charlotte and Miles were born and raised there, at least for the first few years of their lives.
• For me, the best scene of the night was Sawyer watching Kate and Claire.  Not because I care about him and Kate, but because Josh Holloway really sold it.  I forget what a good actor he is because as Sawyer he's usually just scowling at people and calling them names.  But there are moments, like when time flashed and Kate disappeared and he turned to look at Locke, that remind me that Holloway can do more than that.

Just one more picture before I go. It wouldn't be a LOST recap without a Desmond screencap. Desmond was sadly missing from last night's show, so I had to revisit the rock star look from last week:

He was ROCKIN' those Elvis glasses!