Episode 9 - Stranger In A Strange Land
2 January 2009
Review
Present: Jack agrees to help Ben recover in exchange for Juliet’s life. She avoids execution and the Others take Jack back to the main island. Kate and Sawyer head back to camp leaving Karl to go in search of Alex.
Flashback: Jack is “finding himself” in Thailand. He starts sleeping with Achara who won’t tell him what she does for a living. Eventually he follows her and discovers that she “sees” people and then marks (tattoos) them. He forces her to mark him and is soon beaten up and told to leave the country.
The Good: Jack remains a consistent and dark character. I remain impressed that the show’s natural “hero” has such a defined character with so many negative traits in it. I also give credit to Matthew Fox who plays Jack with both disinterest and intensity and makes him seem very real.
Here he treats Achara like Kate and like Sarah. It drives him crazy that he doesn’t know what she does and that makes sense because he is trying to get over his divorce here (we assume, the timeline is not established). Either way his inability to trust people and his need to uncover the truth come through strongly. His angry reaction at the mention of Ana Lucia’s name is also very much his character. He has never trusted the Others and the thought that these children are being inducted into this group angers him.
Kate at least asks Karl a bunch of obvious questions. His attitude to answering them seems to make sense. He doesn’t lie but he hardly gives away details to his people’s enemy. Sawyer’s realisation that Kate doesn’t love him or at least not as much as she loves Jack is pretty clever and pretty sad for him. Unlike Jack, Sawyer seems to have grown as a person and Kate’s love might have softened him further. But it looks like he will become bitter again having realised how she feels. Again it’s good writing because Kate has been in to Jack from the first episode. He has always been the one whose approval she sought and not Sawyer’s.
Jack telling Tom off about the killing and abductions is good to hear at last. Tom’s reply is interesting (those who live in glass houses...); again it seems to hint at the Others having a strange moral code which we have yet to learn about. Juliet’s trial and the need for people to come watch it gives us a small piece of the puzzle. As indeed does the appearance of a “sheriff” and the fact that she still reports to Ben. Karl not knowing the Brady Bunch certainly implies that he has grown up on the island.
The Bad: Hmmm. The writing tries to draw a comparison between Juliet and Jack. They are now going to work together to try and get home and have both been branded as outcasts. Unfortunately the comparison becomes strained because Jack’s “crime” is so bizarrely different. There doesn’t seem to be any reason, other than being an ass hole, for Jack to force Achara to mark him. She warns him that it is a bad idea and that she doesn’t want to do it and yet he uses force to insist on getting his tattoo. In the present the tone of the story marks him out as very much the good guy, so his flashback seems very strange. The emphasis on the story doesn’t seem to be about Jack being selfish and horrible, it is about him being an outcast. Yet he made himself an outcast by abusing his girlfriend and offending a local culture. Perhaps there will be another flashback which will elaborate further on this story, but it does seem bizarre.
A familiar complaint rears its ugly head here. Kate and Sawyer hardly grill Karl about the Others and Jack similarly gives up quickly on Cindy. Again, if you were really trapped on a strange island and desperate to get home wouldn’t you do anything you could to get answers? It really undercuts the credibility of the show not to ask these questions.
The Unknown: Did Achara really have “powers” as we might think of them? Why does Ben dissuade Jack from trusting Juliet when he is offering to help him? Ben seems oddly defensive about Juliet’s affinity to the Others even though Jack could withdraw his offer of help.
Best Moment: Cindy and the children appearing at Jack’s cage. It finally feels like we might get some answers until Jack yells at her. But it is still dramatic to see his disgusted reaction at hearing Ana Lucia’s name and knowing that the Others are responsible for her death, yet no one seems to care.
The Bottom Line: This episode doesn’t feel very important. Not many episodes of Lost can be called filler but unless I am missing something about the Thailand story, this feels like a plot transition and it isn’t very interesting.
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