Season 4, Episode 10 – Something Nice Back Home

After last week’s amazing episode, this week left me saying…meh.

For being the leader of the Losties, Jack seems to be in distress a lot…it’s like there’s an episode every season where he’s either sick or captured or something. Doesn’t exactly make for the strong leader image I’d like to see in Jack. This week, the good doctor was down with a bout of appendicitis. I’m assuming it served to lay the foundation for things to come, but it seemed really forced. Maybe that’s the idea though…as Rose pointed out, why would Jack get sick on an island that heals everyone else, and at this pivotal juncture?

And I know L. Scott Caldwell is probably busy doing other stuff, but does anyone else find it somewhat jarring to have Rose gone for long stretches of the season, only to return for one episode to impart some words of wisdom? Just me? Okay.

Meanwhile, Sawyer, Claire and Miles are making their trek through the jungle back to the beach. Claire drops the hint that she’s been seeing things (there was a hallucination/vision scene filmed for her intended for last week’s episode, but it was cut). Miles has his own visions again as well…sensing the violence that occurred on the spot they were standing. I wasn’t too surprised that he found Karl’s body, but I was SHOCKED…and a little upset…that he found Danielle, too. She was such a great character, I was sure that she’d have survived the shot that she took. Rousseau…heck, ANY Season 1 character…deserves a better sendoff than that. Of course she’ll be back in flashbacks and such, but I feel like her arc wasn’t really completed.

I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that this season has been much, much darker than anything we’ve seen. Between the borderline insane asylum we see on the freighter, Rousseau’s and Karl’s brutal, sudden deaths and subsequent freaky corpse discovery, and Alex’s absolutely shocking death last week, this season is at a depth that I never expected we would see. I love it.

Back to the story…that night, the jungle company make camp. Claire awakens to see Christian Shepherd holding Aaron. (To help with speculation, check out this spoilery clip from the recent “Missing Pieces” campaign.) When Sawyer awakens the next morning, they are both gone. He finds Aaron alone in the woods, but Claire is nowhere to be seen.

Finally, we come to the flashforward. As a friend of mine said, it’s a Jaters’ dream come true. Taking place after the events of Eggtown (Kate’s episode), but before the events of Through the Looking Glass (Season 3 finale), we find that Kate and Jack have definitely hooked up, and it seems that they’ve been in that role for a while…they seem very comfortable together (and they got Aaron a Millennium Falcon toy, which makes them the best parents ever).

Jack heads to see Hurley again, but, even though their meeting was pretty strained last time, this time it’s apparent that Hurley has gone off the deep end…though he could be the sanest of them all. He refuses to take his meds or even talk to the doctors, because he believes that the Oceanic 6 are all dead. He did make a very good point…Jack and Kate’s current life was pretty darn close to Heaven…and in last season’s finale, Jack’s life was pretty darn close to Hell. Hurley left Jack with a couple of bombshells…first, Charlie left Jack a message that “You’re not supposed to raise him” and that Jack would have a visitor soon. Since he had already seen his father once that day, it was pretty easy to figure out who that visitor would be…and this seems to have driven him to his future chemical dependency.

I wonder what’s recording on Jack and Kate’s Tivo.

Finally, we learn that Kate has been sneaking around, doing favors for Sawyer. I’m sure this favor relates to Sawyer’s secret daughter, Clementine, which makes Kate’s hesitation to talk about it understandable, I guess. You’ve got to feel bad for Jack, though…he thought he was finally out from under Sawyer’s shadow, only to find that he is still on Kate’s mind. They fight, culminating in Jack exploding and yelling that Kate is not even related to Aaron, which the boy overhears. Jack loses it and walks away.

Like I said, not the greatest episode ever…no big revelations, save for Jack and Kate’s hook- and break-up. Mostly laying the groundwork for next week…a Locke-centric episode which promises to be great.

Episode grade: B