Season 4, Episode 7 - Ji Yeon

The past few episodes have been a bit of a relative slump for this season. While the first few installments really seemed to start off with a bang, the previous two weeks have seemed to be…well…filler. Ji Yeon, unfortunately, continues that tradition.

In the “main” storyline, Sun convinces Jin that they should not leave the island, and they decide to join in Locke’s camp. Juliet pleads with Sun to leave the island for the sake of her baby…and finally reveals the secret of Sun’s affair to her husband. This results in them staying in Camp Jack. And then they all make up and everyone’s okay. So the characters are in the exact same place as they were when they began the episode. Zero character development = filler.

Elsewhere, Desmond and Sayid are still stuck on the freighter. They receive a note from the mysterious mole on the boat, telling them not to trust the captain. They meet said captain, who reveals that the boat is the property of one Charles Widmore, the father of Des’ beloved Penny. Some chick commits suicide. The captive duo are then lead to their new, roach-infested, blood-stained quarters. This lead to my favorite moment of the episode…the return of Michael, in the guise of janitor Kevin Johnson. I love the barely contained surprise, and somewhat rage, between the characters.

Then, in the flashbacks and flashforwards, we discovered that Sun had a baby girl, named Ji Yeon. Somewhere however, apparently between the “rescue” and the baby’s birth, Jin met some kind of untimely end.

And that’s really it. There weren’t any major revelations…we already knew the freighter was Widmore’s boat, and that they were not really there to rescue the castaways. We already knew that there was wreckage of Oceanic 815 that has been recovered. Granted, these revelations were made to new characters, and that new information has new meaning for them. But, since the series has a finite end in sight, this show has to continue to dish out answers and continue to push the narrative forward. This episode did neither of those things.

Episode grade: C+

UPDATE

So when I was watching the show, I saw all of the dates on the tombstone except for the important one, I guess. Take a look at this picture…especially the date on the far right.

Click to enlarge

Jin’s date of death is actually listed as 2004-9-22…which, for us Americans who don’t read dates like everyone else in the world, translates to September 22, 2004. Sound familiar? That’s the date of the Oceanic 815 crash.

Jin is not one of the Oceanic 6. So now I’m confused…it was teased that we would know the identities of all the Oceanic 6…but Jin seems to have never left the island. Did they consider little prenatal Ji Yeon to be one of the survivors, too?

Now that we have something to talk about, I may have to bump my review up to a B.