TDTVS

The first show of Season 4 is number 70 with an even dozen left to go. We will finish watching all the previous shows a week and a day before Season 5 starts. It would have been perfect, finishing up the day before, had ABC not moved the season premier on me.

This flashforward (which becomes the theme for this season) concerns Hurley and the fact that he keeps seeing his dead friend Charlie from the island. Charlie has something to tell Hurley, but Hurley doesn’t want to hear it, he has to go back to the island.

Real time on the island the Losties split into two factions, most follow Jack in his quest to get everyone rescued by the people on the freighter off shore. While some choose to follow Locke to the Others old home, the Barracks, in an effort to avoid the freighter folks because, they like Ben, think that they are coming to kill everyone.

Episode 69 of 82 is the Season 3 two hour finale. It is listed as two separate episodes on the DVD, but it was shown on TV as one long show, so it counts as just one. It is Jack centric and off island he appears with a full beard and is distraught to near suicide by his drinking, pain pill addiction and an obituary he finds in a newspaper. When he visits the funeral home for the viewing he enters a room full of empty chairs with a coffin. The funeral director appears and tells him is the only person to show up, is he friend or family? To which Jack answers, “Neither.” On island he leads all but three of the Losties to a radio tower so they can call for rescue. Those 3 are left behind to ambush a team of Others who are coming to kidnap the women, especially Sun who is pregnant. The ambush almost works, but is finished up by a returning Hurley, Sawyer and Juliet.

For the satellite phone to work they need two things to happen, the French Chick’s radio signal must be shut down at the tower and the Other’s jamming station needs to be disabled.Ben intercepts the Losties and tries to manipulate Jack into not calling for rescue, but it just earns him a fist beating. Charlie and Desmond are tasked with turning off the jamming. Charlie knows it is a suicide mission for him because of Desmond’s ability to see the future and sure enough it works out that way, but not before Charlie realizes that maybe the rescue boat is not that after all. The show ends off island with Jack meeting Kate at an airport where he tells her, “We should have never left, we have to go back.” Those tricky producers, instead of the off island scenes being flashbacks they were flashforwards.

Sixty-eight of eighty-two is Charlie-centric and the title comes something he is told by a newcomer to the island (parachuted on after her helicopter crashes.) Naomi tells him that his old band put out a Greatest Hits album after he “died” in the crash of Flight 815. It also comes from a list he makes of the 5 greatest things that have happened to him so far after he volunteers for a possible suicide mission to shut off a jammer in an underwater Dharma station.

(67/82) Except for the first couple of minutes where we witness a mother dying in childbirth, this episode takes place entirely on island. In flashbacks we meet a young Ben in his early days as a member of the Dharma Initiative. As with nearly all our main characters, Ben has daddy issues, so much so that he arranges to be the one to actually kill him when the original inhabitants of the island rise up and purge Dharma from their home. In current island time Ben takes Locke to an old cabin in the woods that is home to the only person that Ben answers to, the mysterious Jacob. At first Locke can’t see anyone, but he hears him and then gets a flash of a person in the previously silent and empty chair.

Number 66 of 82 is Locke-centric that involve short range flashbacks that don’t involve leaving the island. Ben tells Locke that to be really free he needs to kill his father, but he can’t. Fortunately, the Others have files on every 815 survivor and it just so happens that there is someone who has a motive to do the job for Locke. Turns out Lockes’s father is the very same man who conned Sawyer’s parents when he was a kid leading to their murder suicide.

The title of episode 65 (of 82) is an abbreviation for Date Of Conception and it centers around the pregnant Sun. Did she conceive the baby off island with her extramarital lover or did she conceive on island with the previously sterile husband Jin. Juliet on the spot sees another chance to help out and volunteers to do an ultrasound to find out just when Sun’s baby was conceived.

The off island flashback concerns Sun being blackmailed by a woman or she will reveal something that will cause Jin great shame. He has told Sun that his parents are dead, but she manages to track down his father, a poor fisherman from a remote village (pictured above, who looks like he has a hell of a dental plan) and will that might seem shameful, what the father reveals is even worse, his mother “had been with many men.” She of course pays off he blackmailer who it turns out is Jin’s mother.

Will you still need Desmond, will you still feed Desmond, when it’s episode sixty-four?

Off island, Desmond is in a monastery, but just as he is getting the hang of it, he gets punched by the brother of the woman he left at the alter to become a monk, he get drunk on the monks wine and gets fired. As he is leaving the monastery he bumps into a beautiful woman who needs a litle help, sparks fly. Her name? Penny.

On island he has this elaborate future vision that involves someone parachuting on the island and Charlie getting an arrow in the throat. He is sure that the person who lands on the island is Penny, his long lost love and to have his vision come true he thinks that all the flashes he sees must be allowed to happen, including the arrow in the throat. In the end he saves Charlie and the parachutist isn’t Penny. Related?