Lost: Season 5 Episode 5: This Place is Death

Well. We needed a cigarette after that one. There was so much shit going on in last night's episode that our tongues dried out from 60 straight minutes of our jaws hanging open in shock. It's not that it was chockful of revelations so much as it was the pace of the plot speeding up and the chess pieces all shifting into radically new positions on the board. Our thoughts are pretty scattered on this one, but we'll try and sum it all up. Make yourself a sandwich and settle in.

♦ First, a moment for poor Charlotte, our canary in a coal mine, whose on-camera deterioration heightened the drama as each character watched with increasing unease what was going to happen to them all eventually. It was a sad little death scene but of course the sadness was overshadowed by her deathbed confession and sudden memory of meeting Daniel as a child. In typical Lost fashion, it answered a bunch of questions while opening up a bunch more.

♦ For one, who's her father? As far as we can tell, Ben is just barely old enough, so it's possible. And if Ben's her father, could that make Ben's childhood DHARMA friend Annie her mother? Again, it's possible. It might explain why Ben stole Danielle's daughter and raised her as his own. One thing's for sure, with this show's history, the question of just who her parents were is not an inconsequential one.

♦ Poor Daniel. So, when we saw him at the Orchid station back in the DHARMA days in the first episode of this season, we figure that would be about the same time that Charlotte was a little girl and he gave her his warning, right? And speaking of people to feel sorry for...

♦ Well, now we can see why Danielle was such a crazy, paranoid bitch when Sayid first met her. Kudos to the writers who clearly had the script from that Season 1 episode in front of them because they managed to work in all the references Danielle made back then: Montand losing his arm in the Dark Territory, her team's "sickness," (which looked like possession to us) which forced her to kill all of them, and the rifle with the firing pin removed, which Sayid tried to use on her back when she held him captive. They even worked in the broken music box that Sayid fixed for her. We still need an answer as to why she never seemed to react to Jin in previous seasons. Surely she recognized him.

♦ One thing about Jin, though: Since when does he know how to get to the radio tower? He'd never been there, right? Still, his reunion with Sawyer might just be one of our all-time favorite moments on the show. Perfectly played.

♦ Man, those time shifts are getting brutal, aren't they? To go along with our just-named new entry into favorite moments, we have to add to our list of top spine-tingling moments the crazy-eyed Charlotte imploring Jin in Korean to never let "her" come back (we're assuming she means Sun) and then ending with "This place is DEATH!"

Yow.

Let's see...what else? Oh!

♦ So possessed-Robert told Danielle that the smoke monster is there to protect the temple. Hmmm. Interesting. So that means it must be pretty ancient. By the way, did you all catch the hieroglyphics on the temple? The ones that matched the countdown clock in the Swan hatch? Hmmm.

♦ Ben is one master manipulator. Not that we didn't already know that, but he could have just handed Sun Jin's ring on the dock but he instead had her drive to the church, hand her the ring, and tell her to follow him inside to save him. Well played, Ben Linus. Well played. By the way, was he just bullshitting when he had his little hissyfit in the van with Jack and Sun? Did he really go to great lengths to protect the O6 for the last 3 years? What does that even mean?

♦ But Sun! Are you just going to leave adorable little Ji Yeon back in Korea? That tearful phone call certainly did have a "goodbye feel" to it.

♦ Jack's a douchebag. Without batting an eye, he lied to Kate and told her that he didn't know anything about Ben's plan to bring them all back to the island. He's becoming more like Ben the longer he's around him.

♦ Did anyone else think Ben looked surprised when Desmond (yay!) referred to Eloise as Daniel's mother? Did he not know that or was he just surprised that Desmond knew that?

♦ And finally, poor John Locke. He desperately wanted to believe that he was destined for great things and instead of leading its people, the island wants him to sacrifice himself. Terry O'Quinn did a fine bit of acting as he came to terms with his fate. But when does Locke arrive in the outside world? How long was he there before he died? How did he die? What did he say to the O6? And the oldest question of all: Just who the hell is Jack's dad, anyway?

Whew! Did we miss anything?

(As a side note, we're getting to RuPaul's Drag Race soon, kittens. There were some tech problems with the online clips and that held us back from getting screencaps. Soon! Promise!)


[Photos: ABC.com]


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