Lost: Meet Kevin Johnson

Sayid: "Why are you on this boat?"
Michael: "I'm here to die."

For me, this episode was all about death. Death figures into what's going on with the Island in a way that I just don't understand.

There's Mikhail Death, where the person just doesn't die, even after something fatal happens to them. There's Island Ghost Zombie Death, which has apparently now happened to Libby. (Along with Christian Shephard, Charlie, possibly Boone, Ben's mother, and Eko's brother Yemi. And maybe the horse.) And then there's real death, like the Marshal, like Nikki and Paulo. What's the difference? And how does it work? The flashback was full of dead characters, too: Tom, Naomi, George Minkowski. I assume that was intentional. It was creepy, too.

And then there's the "Island won't let you die" thing that happened to Michael. How could the Island keep Michael, with a fully loaded and functioning gun, from killing himself? That had a supernatural feel to it that actually made me uncomfortable, because it made zero sense. And yet, I do have confidence that the writers have something specific and logical in mind. I just wish I knew what the hell it was.

Why did Michael choose to kill himself in another car crash? People do survive car crashes; they're hardly reliable. You'd think after his first, long-term, painful experience with a car crash, he'd choose something quicker and more definite, like jumping off a skyscraper. What would have happened if he had? Would he have survived it, anyway, or would someone have stopped him?

I am completely and totally down with what Sayid just did to Michael. Michael is still basically unlikeable and unsympathetic, a murderer and a traitor as well as weak and selfish. Even his obsession with Walt is also selfish at its base because it is less about Walt's welfare, and more about Michael's. Especially if Michael actually burdened Walt with a confession about what Michael did to Ana Lucia and Libby. That Mama Cass song we heard twice in the episode absolutely haunted me, and not because Mama Cass is dead, like Patsy Cline is dead. I think it was a musical echo of Michael's double murder in the Hatch, because the first thing we heard in the Hatch at the beginning of season two was a Mama Cass song. (Not the same one, though.)

There were two big conflicts that I couldn't resolve. (And I'm reeling from that new experience, as Buffy would say.)

The first was the timeline. Michael and Walt left the Island around Thanksgiving, and it is currently the end of December. According to the three-month calendar we saw in "The Constant," the Kahana has been waiting off the coast of the Island since at least the beginning of October, and probably longer. How could Michael have gotten on the Kahana, then? Did the Kahana break up the trip by going to Fiji to pick up supplies and also to pick up Kevin? Or was the calendar faked?

I'm also thoroughly confused about the Sunda Trench hoax. Tom told Michael that Widmore staged the hoax. But Gault said that Ben was behind it. Frank Lapidus the pilot was actually on the freighter because he had told Widmore he knew the Sunda Trench was a hoax, so Frank certainly didn't believe Widmore was behind it. Maybe Widmore told Gault to lie, and was trying to contain Frank, though. Who actually did it?

Ben again said that he doesn't kill innocent people, which we know isn't true since he took out the entire Dharma Initiative. Did he just have Karl and Danielle Rousseau killed? Karl to keep Alex from getting pregnant, and Rousseau to take back parental control of Alex? The last thing in the episode was Alex yelling, "I'm Ben's daughter!" Why would she say that to Ben's own people, since they know very well who she is? She did it because it was the Widmore faction, and she knows they will want to use her against Ben. I think.

Too bad about Karl. I was a lot more broken up about Danielle Rousseau, a character I really liked and will definitely miss. Is she dead? (And again, what kind of dead is she?) Although I have to admit that if she is dead, Rousseau's story has indeed resolved itself. She did find her daughter after sixteen years, and she was just hanging around the Locke group to be with Alex, after all.

Dammit, I liked Danielle Rousseau. Will you guys please stop killing off characters I like?

Character bits:

Eighteen minutes in, we got an eye scene: Michael's left eye. Michael got a left eye scene before, in season one's "Special."

We saw Walt at his grandmother's for about a second, and in a window where we couldn't see how tall he was. If they bring Walt back into the story, they may need to recast him.

Michael pawned the watch that Jin gave him at the end of season one. Nice little detail there.

As we thought, Tom was gay. He had a boyfriend named Arturo in the New York flashback.

Tattoo guy was shooting skeet with a machine gun. No, we're not going nuts, are we?

Naomi's last name was Dorrit. We saw that in a pop-up "enhanced" episode, but I don't think it's been mentioned in a regular episode until now.

Okay, I give up. The preview for the next set of episodes confirmed that Aaron is indeed one of the Oceanic Six. Did they want us indefinite and confused about this up until last week's so that we would dither about Jin? If so, it certainly worked on me.

Bits and pieces:

— Locke's group is ready to rebel because of Ben. I wanted more, but there was too much other plot stuff going on. At least Locke was sharing information, something Jack hasn't been good at doing. Not all of the information, though.

— The 324 bodies in the Sunda Trench came from a graveyard in Thailand. But weren't most of the bodies supposed to be of Caucasians? Yes, the staged wreck is impossible to reach, but still.

— We got a good look at the side of the Kahana. It appeared that it once had a longer name, and that the second part of the name was scratched out. Or am I nuts?

— I think I heard Kurt Vonnegut mentioned. He wrote Slaughterhouse Five, which has most certainly been discussed before because his character Billy Pilgrim jumped around uncontrollably in his own lifetime.

— One month break. The next new Lost airs on April 24, at a new time, 10:00. So I don't have a conflict with Supernatural any more. Yay.

Quotes:

George: "What, are you going Nicholson on us?" The Shining was also about seeing dead people, come to think of it. And suicide.

Karl: "I just have a bad feeling about this." And he was right, poor kid. And of course, this is the famous Star Wars line. It was said in each of the six Star Wars movies.

This was by far and away the most interesting Michael-centric episode. Three out of four polar bears,

Billie
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

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