the blast door map

well the streak had to end sometime. weakest episode of the season, but understand that by now my standards are almost ridiculously high. but also understand that my standards have only been dictated by the ridiculously high standards of the show itself.



directed by: eric laneuville. the first not jack bender and not stephen williams to direct this season. on the downside, eric directed my most hated episode in the show's history, the rose bernard ickfest, 's.o.s,' as well as the slight but serviceable 'tricia tanaka is dead' (hurley and the van episode). on the plus side, he directed 'the other 48 days,' and last season's locke/sawyer denouement 'the brig,' both excellent episodes. i would say 'the other woman' falls squarely in the middleground in terms of quality.

written by: drew goddard and christina m. kim. i wonder how the writer's room hierarchy works. these two have always shared writing credit with someone else, but other writers will always write by themselves. is it related to your producer credit? curious. they've each contributed to good episodes, though christina shares the other half of the blame for that atrocious tattoo episode.

1. opening
2. who's got gas
3. gainesville
4. daddy vs. penny
5. boat guy
6. harper and not harper
7. juliet looks like 'her'
8. minor gripe
9. cool details

1. loved the opening scene. a brilliant tease to make us think that somehow juliet is one of the oceanic 6, and needs counseling because of it. then tom pops in. nope. she's a celebrity because she's going to 'save' the others. very clever.

2. this episode was all about gas. who's got gas, who wants to release the gas, who wants to neutralize the gas. if harper was a manifestation of smokey, then we can assume that smokey wants to retain the ability to use the gas, and kill everyone except the chosen few. smokey always appears to people in the form of someone for whom they harbor tremendous guilt: why?? the answer is pretty clear - smokey knows it's the best way to manipulate someone into doing what smokey wants.

ben's dead mother appeared to him as a child. cut to: ben gassing the island. was gasing the island ever ben's agenda? or smokey's? i think we'll discover as the show progresses, exactly what smokey's (jacob's?) agenda is, and why it's so important that it retain the ability to 'reset' the island inhabitants to its liking.

perhaps this is what 'the lists' are for? jacob is choosing those who will survive the next purge, the ones who are worthy to live on, and protect, the island.

3. this episode was just chock full of weak arguments. ben tells locke that he's the equivalent of novelty mold from gainesville florida that millions of people will flock to. now i know that locke is impressionable (and i did enjoy the earlier ben/locke scenes in this episode), but it really only works when ben is actually being clever. i also think that ben works best when he's written by people who are actually as smart as he is. otherwise his dialogue is predictable, and worse, redundant. but mostly it was just funny that they referred to gainesville as the epicenter of credulity.

4. and so we get some major answers.



we now have confirmation that it is indeed penny's dad waging war against ben for the island. it's interesting how unsatisfying certain revelations are. not every reveal can be a huge shocker, especially when it's something that we've suspected since penny picked up that arctic phone call. what i'm curious about though is widmore's connection to dharma - was dharma totally separate (where are the food drops coming from?) from widmore?



also - the real henry gale's hot air balloon was a widmore balloon. was this widmore's first attempt to penetrate the island?

5. well, now i'm leaning back towards ben's man on the boat being michael. which is sad. because if it's true, the tease leading out of this episode makes it less of a surprise than ever. ben would only suggest that locke sit down before spilling the beans if it was going to be someone that locke knows, and so now the only real answer is michael. which feels like another disappointment. please please please don't let it be michael. please let it be inevitable and surprising. and if it is michael, there had better be a seriously satisfying retcon explaining exactly how (and why) michael would ever be this person. is ben somehow holding walt hostage again? michael wouldn't have gotten to the freighter until after the sky turned purple (michael didn't even leave the island until just after the event) and communications went down - so how would he have transmitted the identities of the people on board? seriously, if i'm to believe that it's michael, there are a LOT of logistical hoops to jump.

6. i did not like this actress.



ethan was the other's surgeon. clearly he also did botox and eye rejuvenations.

or maybe eric laneuville just isn't the best director, but i thought she was overwrought, redundant, and indicating. wouldn't the episode play better if we sympathized with her instead? juliet is supposed to feel guilty about inadvertently getting her husband killed, but one of the many problems with this episode is that it makes improper use of juliet's stoneface. used right, her blank expression makes us wonder if she's good or bad, if she knows something or not. but here, we need to -know- several things: does she really love goodwin? does she feel guilty about being the other woman, or does she enjoy it? it feels like the writing is saying one thing, and the execution is saying another.

but that's not even the point of this section. let's talk about the elements of the episode that are part of the larger mythology: is harper a manifestation of smokey? yes. the clues: 1) whispers before appearing. 2) claims to have orders from ben, when she never could have seen ben. 3) person from character's past, of whom guilt is harbored about. 4) sudden, impossible disappearance.

jack spoke to the harper manifestation. from missing piece #13, we know that the manifestations are physically present, and visible to all. that was most definitely smokey who appeared to juliet.

7. harper says that ben would naturally like juliet, because she looks just like 'her.' which is interesting. who is the "she" that harper is referring to? ryan mcgee speculates deeply that it is annie, who as a child has the wrong color hair, but could certainly grow to look like juliet. more likely, i think it's a disturbing reference to ben's mother, who does actually look a lot like juliet.



more interesting is the fact that ben never even saw his mother in real life, her having died in childbirth. ben only knew her from a photograph, and that image is what smokey bases the manifestation on - check it out, she's got the same outfit on from ben's photo.



ben harbors massive amounts of guilt over his dead mother - which smokey exploits in order to gas dharma off the island.

now, does ben have some kind of disturbing attraction to this image of his mother? it wouldn't surprise me, and with the introduction of juliet to the camp, he now has someone who 'looks just like her' that he can transfer his affections to without feeling oedipal guilt.

what's also interesting is that at the beginning of season 3, ben exploits juliet's image with jack the same way smokey had done with ben. he says to jack 'do you think it's a coincidence that juliet resembles your ex-wife?' ben had hoped to use jack's prior affection and guilt associated with sarah to get him to perform the surgery.

so jack and ben have something in common: lust for the juliet enigma which may or may not actually be displaced lust for someone who 'looks just like her.'

and that weird, absolutely unearned jack/juliet kiss? no. how was this episode so exponentially inferior?

8. well, i have more of a major gripe this week. generally, i think this episode just wasn't written as strongly as it could have been. the cleverest thing about it was the title, and even that isn't very clever. after last week, we've seen that a compelling relationship can be built in just the 4 short flashback scenes with penny and des. there is no reason why we couldn't have similarly cared about juliet's relationship with goodwin. when ben takes her to see goodwin's body, it should have been heartbreaking, and unbearably cruel. first i thought, well, i wasn't that moved by it because i already knew that goodwin was going to die - but foreknowledge of a plot point is not a reason for it not to be effective. we knew that locke was going to end up in a wheelchair, but that didn't diminish the power of the specific events that led up to it.



i can see on paper how this episode was supposed to go - the juliet/goodwin beach scene was supposed to give us something to root for - a reason to hope that these two stay together, and to give us a sense of foreboding, knowing that goodwin is going to die. we're also meant to feel that they are 'right' together, and that harper is being wronged.

ultimately the point of the episode is to give us this idea that ben still has control over juliet. so see him so out of character is jarring and strange - and introduced this far into the story, it feels a bit tacked-on. 'oh, let make it so that ben really likes juliet, that'll give the story some oomph.' i think that tacked-on feeling was yet another symptom of lackluster writing. as evidenced by missing pieces #12 (the only one of the missing pieces to actually be a cut scene, and not new footage - so the information in this 'piece' is not necessarily retcon, just omission) ben's affection for juliet was originally going to be established in her very first scene. i'm not sure why the reference was cut. for this episode to really work, we needed at least a couple real clues planted in episodes along the way, that would allow us to believe that ben might be obsessed with juliet.

also, the charlotte/farraday plot made absolutely no sense at all. 'we're going to artificially conceal our objectives so that we can reveal the ironic truth after you've made all the wrong assumptions about us! also, there will be yet another ticking-clock crisis averted literally at the last second!' yawn.

9. cool details:

• the new station is 'the tempest.' of course referring to the many similarities to the plot of the play.
• zack and emma are mentioned as being taken care of by juliet. another tie-in to juliet having something to do with the treatment of the children. sure to become important later when michael ties juliet up to find out what exactly they did to walt.