Ji-Yawn

Warning: I'm going to complain for a paragraph; skip it if you enjoyed the episode last night.

I love Lost, but "Ji-Yeon" was banausic. The problem, in my opinion, is that Sun and Jin have never been key players in the overall chess match of Lost. So every time they get a flashback (or flashforward) the Lost narrative is put on pause for their subplot. They do not contribute to the story. Nothing happens as a result of their actions. They aren't even developed as characters. Did Jin grow from his experience in this episode? Did Sun? Nope. She's still a manipulative liar, and he's still letting her boss him around out of guilt over his previous callousness. Been there, done that, in my opinion. Why waste the audience's time with an episode devoted to them if the characters aren't going to grow or change? If we don't learn anything new about them? If they don't actually do anything to affect the Lost storyline? The writers have done a good job incorporating other minor players, like Charlie and Hurley, into the overall story, but Sun and Jin have always been, and remain, an unnecessary subplot. My biggest beef with last night was Jin's flashback with the Panda. There was absolutely zero story value to those scenes. They existed solely to trick us into thinking he was alive in the flashforward.

Okay, rant over.

The Island of the Day Before
The Island of the Day Before is a great novel by Umberto Eco, about a man marooned on a ship just across the International Date Line from an island. The man goes crazy. Doesn't this remind you of Lost's freighter, the Kahana, which appears to be a day behind Island time (thanks to dilation), and where all of the shipmates are going nuts?

Kahana KarazyLuckily, the Freighter portion of "Ji-Yeon" did have some forward narrative motion. Regina, who was so dazed she was reading a book upside-down, killed herself. I like Jeff Jensen's theory, that she was Naomi's lover (R.G.) and killed herself out of grief. But according to the devilish Captain Gault, all of his crew is "experiencing some kind of heightened cabin fever," which he believes is due to their proximity to the Island. Creepy. Not to mention, whose blood-stain was that in the roach room?

Captain Straight-TalkSo first we get a note from Michael, "Don't trust the Captain." And then the Captain, in an unprecedented move for a character on Lost, straight-up spills the beans to Sayid and Desmond for no reason. According to him, Widmore discovered the 815 wreckage, and believes that Ben is responsible for the fake crash remains.

I say, bologne. This guy wouldn't offer answers like that, unless it was a story he, thus Widmore, wanted believed. I'm betting that Widmore staged the fake crash, to keep other people from looking for it, so that no one else would stumble upon his coveted Island. Though I would like to hear what the Black Box has to say.

Oceanic 6
According to Jin's tombstone, he died on September 22, 2004. The day of the crash. That makes Aaron the fifth member of the Oceanic 6, and Sun the sixth. I was wrong about Jin.

After some blatant trickery by the writers, where Sun has a flashforward and Jin has a flashback, we learned that Jin is not with Sun in the future, and that he is believed dead by the media. The question is, did he really die, or is he "dead" in the sense that all of the 815 survivors are "dead" according to the Oceanic 6 cover story. My guess is that he's still alive on the Island. That gives Sun an impetus to return to the Island, now that her baby is successfully born, in Season 5. If you think about it, each of the Oceanic 6 has a reason to go back:

Jack=Juliet/Survivor Guilt
Kate=Sawyer
Hurley=Ghost of Charlie told him to
Sayid=Duty to protect and save his "friends" that Ben alluded to in "The Economist"
Sun=Jin
Aaron=Claire (though this is more a reason why Kate should want to return)

My Roommate's Clever Theory
Nicolas Kline has a theory that makes Jin's completely unnecessary flashback more interesting. Playing off my theory that the vector you use to leave the Island takes you to a different point in both space and time, Nick suggested that Jin may have traveled back in time, whereas Sun traveled forward. That would, of course, mean that there would now be two Jins running around in the real world. The present-day Jin of 2000, and the 2004-version of Jin that came back from the Island. But maybe, just maybe, 2004-Jin killed 2000-Jin! Whew! The paradoxes of time travel!

Next Week
The Return of Michael, the rechristened Kevin Johnson. The flashbacks are all about him. We learn how he went from Island Escapee to Freighter Janitor/Saboteur in about 30 days (in the show's time). My theory? The vector Ben gave Michael and Walt sent them back in time to before 2004, giving Michael plenty of time to start a new life and get coerced by Ben into getting on the freighter, and giving Walt plenty of time to grow to the stature we saw him in the Season 3 finale.

"Meet Kevin Johnson" was co-written by Elizabeth Sarnoff and Brian K. Vaughan, directed by Stephen Williams, and will be the last new Lost before the month-long break. Lost will then return on April 24th at 10PM (to make room for new Grey's episodes. Ick.), for five more episodes, the fifth of which is actually a two-hour finale that will be stretched into two weeks (once again thanks to Grey's).

Closing Tidbits: The admitting nurse in Sun's flashforward was played by one of Lost's eight staff writers, Christina Kim (she wrote last week's ep with Drew Goddard)......and Sun was watching a Korean-dubbed episode of Nikki's Expose: