After last week's foray into silly fun, ABC's 'Lost' roars back this week with an episode that...wait for it....actually deals with the mystery of the island! Yes, I know, I was shocked, too.
First of all, let's get ourselves through and past the silly subplot concocted by showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. While the main action dealt with the mythology of the island that we've been looking at for three years, Sawyer and Hurley...play ping-pong. Yikes. Hurley plays Sawyer for his ransacked tent of pilfered goods. If Sawyer wins, he gets his stuff back. If he loses, he can't use a nickname for a week (and on this show, that may be about ten episodes). Of course, Hurley turns out to be an amazing ping-pong player, but kindly offers Sawyer his things anyway, because he's the type who needs them to begin with.
Onto more important matters. This week, we look back at more of the life of Sayid, the Iraqi ex-soldier. In his flashback, we see how, when living in Paris, Sayid accidentally runs into a man whose wife, it turns out, was once at the violent hand of Sayid's torture, when he was a member of the Republican Guard. The majority of the flashback has the man and his wife making Sayid admit he remembers what he did to the poor woman; the more Sayid denies it, the more he gets hurt. At the end, the woman speaks to Sayid about a cat she found being abused outside of her apartment building, after her torture. This impassioned speech makes Sayid break down and admit he remembers her. Since he does so, she promises to forgive him and get him out of there.
The only real connection from the flashback to the action in the present is the cat, which makes, it looks like, a surprising appearance at yet another Dharma station, The Flame. The Flame appears to be populated by only one person: the mysterious man in the eyepatch who we saw for a few seconds during the fall episodes. Sayid, Locke, Kate and Danielle, the Frenchwoman, stumble upon the Flame and the man in the eyepatch early in the episode. Unfortunately for Sayid, he sees the cat at the front of the station, and is so shocked by it he doesn't realize that the man in the eyepatch is watching him, and shoots him in the shoulder.
Of course, soon after a standoff between Locke, Kate and the man in the eyepatch, named Mikhail, Sayid is stitched up. Mikhail says he's the last living member of the Dharma Initiative, but Sayid thinks he's really one of the Others. Soon after, his suspicions are confirmed. Mikhail reveals that the Flame was meant for communication with the outside world, but Locke finds out that all communications are down. As Sayid and Kate look around the station for clues, Locke plays a game of chess; lots of games in this episode. While Sayid and Kate, in the basement, find a batch of dynamite and also Ms. Klugh (the woman who was with Walt at the end of season 2), Locke finally wins a game of the computer chess game, which turns out to be a way to manually override the system. Dr. Marvin Candle (remember him?) appears on the screen and tells Locke that, if there's been an insurgence of the hostiles (who are really the Others), he should enter 77, hence the title.
As he's about to, Mikhail, who's been tied up by Sayid, attacks Locke. A standoff between Mikhail and Locke, and Kate, Sayid and Ms. Klugh begins. Ms. Klugh and Mikhail argue in Ukranian and then she tells him to "do it." It turns out to be killing her, which Mikhail does. Then, Sayid and Kate take some food and supplies back. As they walk out with Danielle, who refused to go inside for fear of her life, Locke catches up with them. As he does, the Flame...well, goes up in flames. Turns out that Locke did enter 77, which set off the dynamite found earlier in the episode. Sayid's not too pleased about this, but he leads the party away from the explosion, as the episode ends.
A lot happens in this episode, and I couldn't be happier. It's nice for this show to actually get back to its sci-fi/action roots. I just hope the rest of the season (or at least most of it) keeps things up.
