Ji-Yeon

Crouching Dragon, Hidden Panda

Everybody Loves a panda!!! Especially when you really, really need one. Because that’s when a panda is most likely to be there for you, right? Right. Because as far as I’m concerned, the panda sure as shit wasn’t there the first time around. What the hell am I talking about? I’m talking about the fact that Jin can walk straight up to a store clerk who happens to be standing in front of a giant panda and somehow NOT see it. He asks for a panda and the clerk whisks him off to an aisle of plush dolls to uncover the secret hidden ‘last’ panda. And after Jin loses it in a Mr. Bean-esque series of trips, drops, and fist-shaking mishaps… he returns to the store only to discover a second giant panda resting next to a dragon on the shelf behind the clerk –right where a dragon (and only a dragon) existed just a minute ago. As so often happens on LOST, sought-after things are miraculously provided. From Sun’s pregnancy test to Charlie’s guitar, from Jack’s dynamite to Ben’s spinal surgeon… all things come to those who need them. The phenomenon goes by many names: suggestive manifestation, the magic box - this time I think it’s more along the lines of course correction. Jin was in desperate need of a damned panda and poof – there it was. Think I’m reading too much into this? Think I’m talking out of my ass? 9 out of 10 people do. But then again, those are the same people who still think the picture frame changes in Miles ghost-hunter flashback can be chalked up as ‘set error’.

So a doctor walks into a waiting room and says ‘Thank you for your patients’

Not that he needs the money, but Charles Widmore should rent the Freighter out for Halloween parties, because man, is this boat one freaky place! We got roaches, suicidal crew members, and blood splatter on the walls. (I loved the deadpan doctor's line: ''That shouldn't be there.'') And we got a heartless Aussie captain named Gault who likes to tell spooky stories about people who should be dead and yet are very much alive. Doc Ray is sent to retrieve Sayid and Desmond. For interrogation? For torture? No. He’s bringing them to the bridge so the captain can provide some answers. Gault brought out the black box of Oceanic 815, purchased, he explained, at great cost and through secret channels by his boss, Widmore. (The mention of his name caused Desmond's peepers to pop out of his sockets in surprise.) Gault told the castaways that the world thinks all 324 passengers were found at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Clearly, this was staged — but how? ''Where exactly does one come across 324 bodies?'' Gault asked. Then he put this conspiracy right at the feet of the man he and his freighter thugs had come to nab: Benjamin Linus. Our freighter questions mount: Why does Widmore have his ascot in a bunch over Ben? And what was that secret midnight mission Lapidus, a self-proclaimed castaway ally, went on?

Ha! C’mon, we’re four seasons in now and a lot smarter than that. Captain Gault’s mission becomes obvious this episode: to lay the groundwork for what will become Charles Widmore’s "story". That’s the only reason he would voluntarily provide answers. He freely offers up the name of his benefactor, drags Sayid and Desmond into his quarters, and goes to very great lengths to ‘tell it like it is’. For some reason at this point it becomes important to impart upon Sayid/Desmond that the crash is staged, Widmore is good, Ben is bad, you guys should really want to kick his ass, etc…etc…etc… Even over-eager Doc Ray gets in on the act while leading them back to their new brain-stained quarters: "He’s pretty forthcoming, right? Right?" Yeah, right. Except that Sayid’s sarcastic retort tells us that he’s already caught on. I don’t believe for one minute that Ben is behind the ‘staged’ jetliner at the bottom of the ocean, or the hundreds of rotting bodies, or the big elaborate cover-up (nor do I believe that Ben’s totally innocent either). It doesn’t take a "Don’t trust the captain" note for me either – I simply don’t believe Gault. Either he’s lying outright, or he’s been duped into believing and perpetuating that story by Widmore. And since so far we’ve seen nothing but a ship of fools – unknowing fools or crazy ones – I’d like to think someone on the freighter is in at least part of the loop.

I knew High School English would be good for something

As I watched trance-like Regina toss herself over the railing, the chains strapped to her body starkly reminded me of something – something to do with high school. Ten minutes later I had it: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The freighter was the ship from the story, stuck dead and motionless upon an endless ocean. The island was the albatross, chained around the crew’s necks – they’d spent too much time there and now they were doomed. They can’t move, they can’t flee, and they can only suffer for their folly. The most chilling part of this episode was not seeing that future Jin was dead. It wasn’t when Kevin Johnson emerged from the shadows and Michael’s face came into view (although that was awesome). No, the most chilling part of the episode was when doc Ray was leading them to the ‘quiet part of the ship’. Desmond responded with ‘but this ship is not moving’, and with a shrug the doctor replied: "Well if you say so…"

Hurley Rocks a mean suit

As sad as the whole Sun/Jin story was this episode, the only real mystery there is what happens to Jin. I think our best guess at this point is that whatever happens to him happens to Claire, Sawyer, Rose, Bernard, and everyone else who didn’t either hitch a ride home on the wave of fame (the O6) or sneak back on their own accord (Ben). Because not for a minute do I think Jin is dead. He, along with most of the rest of the 815'ers that are not the "O6", are still on the island. Weather Sun or even Hurley know this I'm still not sure. Hurley knows some and probably more so than Sun. Not sure if anyone knows everything. At least we can agree on one thing, we sure a shit don't know everything, yet. But a little side mystery popped up when Hurley asked Sun if ‘anyone else was coming’. When she replied no, he said ‘gooood’, as if relieved. Was he hoping not to see Jack, Kate, Sayid, etc? Or was he hoping not to see the ghost(s) of the other people left behind, the way he saw Charlie.

Course Correction

Okay, theory time. So I don’t believe Ben staged the plane crash, but then again, I don’t think Widmore did it either. And I’m pretty sure Oceanic Airlines can get no good press out of gruesome footage of a body-filled wreckage. So just who DID stage the crash of flight 815?

Answer: No one. The plane really did crash.

This is hard to grasp at first, but the more LOST plays out the more sense it seems to make. I think most of us agree the plane was brought to the island for its own purposes - whatever they might be. On the island virtually anything goes, which is why so many necessary people survived the crash. This is the magic of LOST. But back in the real world, if we believe in the path of fate, the plane was supposed to crash. The people on board were supposed to die. That event played out, as a matter of the universe course-correcting itself, with the plane even sinking to the bottom of the ocean in the same three parts it broke into when it was torn apart in the air. In that one split second the plane existed in both universes: both the LOST universe, and the normal one. On island, everyone is given a tabula rasa, or clean slate. See you in another life – and it truly is another life. The island and its inhabitants have their play lists and go through their motions, with the ‘surviving’ members of flight 815 looking on incredulously and playing their parts. Meanwhile, off-island, certain things that were supposed to happen cannot now happen… because the elements necessary to course correction are no longer in that universe. Let’s take Ms. Hawking’s man with the red shoe, for example. If you pushed him out of the way of his construction death, the universe would find a way to kill him tomorrow as a matter of course correction. But if he were suddenly gone from the universe tomorrow – the way flight 815 vanished – the universe would be screwed out of doing that. The wreckage exists in the normal world, but it also exists scattered across the beach on LOST island. There’s no way I believe that anyone - Widmore, Ben, Bill Gates, The Wizard of Oz, or Bob the Builder with a giant Australia-sized crane actually went through the trouble of painstakingly recreating that crash site. That IS the crash site, because the plane actually crashed. And I’ll bet one day we’ll hear the black box recording to prove it. When Frank Lapidus is looking at the decaying body of the ring-less pilot on the news, is he really looking at a universally-course corrected version of himself in the cockpit of that plane? Because according to fate, he was supposed to be piloting flight 815. According to fate, he’s already dead. Ohhhh…… shit my head hurts now.

Grave Matters

This story, unexpectedly, dealt with resolving Sun's sin against her husband — her infidelity with Jae — yet also completed Jin's redemptive reconstruction into a husband worthy of his wife's faithfulness. Recognizing his own moral failure during his fishing-boat heart-to-heart with Bernard (a kinda corny but altogether effective scene), the former underworld strongman was able to forgive Sun and recognize his role in pushing her away. But the beautiful moment came when he said he would follow her to Locke's camp — this, from the man who just a couple months ago, in Lost time, demanded his wife obediently trot after him. Well played by Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim, this was Jin and Sun's finest hour since season 1.

Do we really have to have the big fight over the flash forward/flashback story? We are aren't we? ''Ji-Yeon'' seemed to contain a shared flash-forward that seemed to reveal that both Jin and Sun had made it off the Island. More, it appeared to tell the story of the birth of their child, a daughter named Ji-Yeon (which means either ''delay'' or ''flower of wisdom''), and how Jin missed the blessed event because of a comic episode involving his frustrated quest to buy a giant stuffed panda. But then the show pulled the rug on us. Hard. Lost had given us an episode with both a flashback (that panda business was part of an errand Jin was running for his mobster boss, Sun's father, Mr. Paik) and a flash-forward (we learned that Sun, a member of the Oceanic 6, got off the Island in time to successfully duck its anti-pregnant-lady curse and give birth). Jin's flashback served as a touchstone that reminded him (or just us) of the morally flimsy man he used to be. He needed to feel that anew — and we needed to see that again — in order for him to be able to (very quickly) reach reconciliation with his wife in the Island present.

In the last scene, we saw Hurley travel to Seoul and join Sun in visiting Jin's grave and introducing Ji-Yeon to her father, at least in spirit. The ending to Ji Yeon was nowhere near as straightforward as it might have initially appeared. One element of this story is certain: Jin is somewhere far apart from Sun in her flash forward. Now, the heavily debated issue will become much like the question Matthew Abbadon once posed to Hurley: is Jin still alive? The episode leaves open two perfectly valid interpretations for these events. Sun still wears her wedding ring, and she desperately tried to stop the doctors from removing it. The pain of childbirth put her into a state of emotional distress, in which she began calling out for her lost husband, even though she knew his presence was impossible. At the end of the episode, Sun speaks to the stone there as if it were Jin: "I wish you could’ve been there. I miss you so much". The memorial date of Jin’s death as September 22, 2004, the same day of the 815 plane crash, which indicates that Jin is not buried in the cemetery. All of these facts are worth noting, but none of them offer any definitive proof one way or another.

A couple of possibilities:

1. The marker was erected when Jin and all the other passengers were declared dead. But Jin really isn't dead. He's on the Island, or somewhere, for some reason. Hurley and Sun — who clearly have secrets to keep regarding the fate of their friends — merely went to Jin's grave site for the sake of keeping up appearances. After all, they're super-celebs in the future, their movements and choices are being tracked by the press — and, possibly, their enemies.

2. Nope: Jin's dead. He's gonna bite it in the unfolding Island story. So while the marker bears the wrong date, it's all the same to Sun: Her husband is gone.

This development creates a unique new situation for Jin’s character in future episodes. One of the most common complaints against the introduction of flash-forwards has been that knowledge of future outcomes removes much of the show’s dramatic tension. In Jin’s case, though, the flash-forward now creates the exact opposite effect. Jin now exists on the show in an uncertain state between life and death. Somewhere in Korea, there is a tombstone with Jin’s name on it. Watching Jin on the island again will feel similar to seeing a ghost. In many ways, the viewer now experiences the same predicament in which Desmond found himself during Season Three. We suspect that something horrible will happen to Jin, but we do not know exactly when or exactly how this situation will play out. To an even greater extent than Desmond, though, the audience is now completely powerless to prevent this future. Like so many other unanswered questions on Lost, the show probably will not reveal the literal answer to this episode's central question for a significant period of time. We do not know whether Jin’s body will be physically alive by the time of Sun's flash forward in 2005. Even so, the episode as a whole presents several other possible conceptions of Jin's life to consider. On the island, Jin promised Sun: "I’ll do everything it takes to protect you and the baby. And you will never lose me." Has Jin lived up to those promises? Even though Jin and Sun are hopelessly separated, in what sense can we say that Jin is still alive in the world? The answer to this question depends on the ultimate meaning of what constitutes Jin’s life.

BERNARD: It’s all about karma, Jin. You know karma? You make bad choices, bad things happen to you. You make good choices, then good … [Jin catches a fish.] Wow! Look, now you see. Now that’s karma. We must be the good guys, huh?

I can't finish the Jin/Sun story rehash without bringing up Juliette spilling the beans about Sun's affair to Jin in order to prevent them from skipping off to Locke's camp. My jaw hit the floor. The balls on Juliet! That was ice cold and awesome!

Why did Regina kill herself?

Because she was inconsolable over the death of her lover — the late, Locke-knifed Naomi. Remember the inscription on her bracelet? ''N, I'll always be with you, R.G.'' Yep: I'm thinking Regina is ''R.G.''

Hey — don't I know you from someplace? Oh, yeah! You're the guy who sold out my friends and killed those two Tailie girls just to get your weirdo psychic son back!

I loved this scene. Doc Freighter was showing Sayid and Desmond to their bug-infested quarters when he summoned freighter janitor Kevin Johnson to scrub that brain paint off the wall. (Shades of Radzinsky, Kelvin's former partner in the Hatch and originator of the blast-door map, who blew his brains out and left some stain on the Swan's ceiling.) Pushing his mop bucket down the hall, K.J. emerged from the shadows and revealed himself to be Michael, looking both meeker and buffer than we last saw him at the end of season 2, sailing away from the Island with Walt. He and Sayid shared a tense moment ("Please please please don't bust me!") For a few fateful days, Michael became a murderer and a traitor. Now he has spent weeks living a new life under an assumed name. The name Kevin Johnson serves not only as a plot necessity, but also as a symbol of his new life after the island. Desmond, who made the phrase "See you in another life" famous, actually regards the man in front of him as Kevin Johnson. Sayid might have taken his hand not only to conceal Michael’s secret, but perhaps also as a gesture of forgiveness and his acceptance of Kevin Johnson’s new life. (Sayid understands Michael's situation better than anyone. He himself once committed the same act: he betrayed his people, murdered an innocent Iraqi soldier, and wounded himself in order to free Nadia.) Perhaps the timing of Michael's murders marks the most significant difference between his story and the stories of all of Lost’s other murderers, such as Sayid. By habit, we tend to judge characters based on their actions in 2004, the ‘present’. Most of the other main characters completed the darkest chapters of their lives before the island, but Michael/Kevin currently remains in that horrible stage of his own journey. The audience can forgive 2004 Jin for the actions of 2000 Jin. Will we eventually be able to forgive Kevin Johnson for the actions of Michael Dawson?

The Oceanic 6 is set. Right? Right?

Sun's flash-forward fake-out seemed to close out the first act of Lost's future-time story line: identifying the members of the Oceanic 6, the celebrity miracle survivors of Oceanic 815. To recap, they are Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Aaron, and Sun. Now, I know what some of you are saying: Aaron can't be a member of the Oceanic 6 because he wasn't born prior to the crash and therefore was not technically an Oceanic 815 passenger. To which I say, Please. Don't be so literal. In the Lost world, the Oceanic 6 is clearly a media-coined term, pinned on these six souls by some clever headline writer or newscaster. So let's call it, The Oceanic 6 is settled. Now, let's move on to the next act of their story, which I'm betting will cover two big points: the backstory behind Jack's downward spiral into boozy, grizzly-bearded, we-gotta-go-back-to-the-Island mania, and more context for Ben and Sayid's secret war with their list of mysterious off-Island foes.

Life After Death

Throughout Jin's storyline, this episode presented a series of clues to indicate that his scenes were flashbacks. The camera calls attention to Jin's outdated cellular phone, and the store clerk refers to the Year of the Dragon (2000 on Chinese calendars). The chronology was jumbled further, in such a way that the audience sees Jin rushing to the hospital before the scene in which Sun tries to notify him. Sun’s flashes even included a brief glimpse of Nikki from Exposé, as a hint that a similar surprise ending might be in store. The most revealing clue of all though should have Jin’s behavior. Jin remarks that he has become a much different man on the island than he once was before it. The 2004 Jin is a thoughtful and devoted husband, while the 2000 Jin is a cold-hearted man driven by ambition. His flashbacks highlighted not his need to be with his wife, but his need to acquire a material object, the stuffed panda. Jin explains that the panda is not a sign of his affection for Sun, but "a symbol of Mr. Paik's eagerness to do business in the great country of China". Along his way towards completing this service to the Paik empire, Jin bribes, intimidates, threatens to kill a man, and he even flirts with a nurse afterward. Regardless of these differences, Daniel Dae Kim somehow succeeded in his portrayal of these two different personalities, while he still maintained the necessary illusion of playing the same character throughout.

This ending was one even I didn't see coming. The Lost "powers that be" are getting perfect at the misdirection play.