Initial Thoughts: "The Little Prince"

This was the first "meh" episode for me of the season. The whole thing seemed to be suffering from a profound lack of stakes:

1. Charlotte's dying! Oh wait -- Charlotte's fine.

2. Hurley's still in jail! No problem, Ben's magic lawyer will get him out by morning.

3. The mysterious client who actually wants Aaron is: Ben! Who doesn't actually want to steal Aaron...or expose the Oceanic Six...but just wanted to strong-arm Kate into going back to the island.

In other words, a lot of the potentially big plot points that they made us worry about in previous episodes were explained away as if they were nothing in this one. "The Lie" ended with Hurley turning himself in and Ben freaking out about it. "Jughead" ended with Charlotte hemorrhaging her brains out.

No problem. Fixed. Don't worry about it. Which implies that the only reason those complications were introduced in the first place was to bide some time. And to supply a cheap Goosebumps-style cliffhanger to each episode.

Kate gets more and more unlikable by the minute. The episode opens with a flashback to her and Jack on Penny's boat, and her rationale for keeping Aaron is actually only that she's grown attached to him and doesn't want to lose anybody else. And we're supposed to accept that. Seriously. Here's a woman facing a prolonged court battle about a murder she committed, and she wants to drag a kid, who doesn't belong to her, through it with her -- a kid who (a) Claire's mother and (b) Aaron's dad are both legally entitled to. The more I think about it, the more disgusted I am. What a horrendous sense of entitlement.

Back on the island, Sawyer & Co. bid their time. They walked around and noticed some events from Season 1 (the light in the hatch, Claire giving birth). Things got a bit more interesting when they came upon the abandoned beach and noticed two connected canoes from Ajira Airways -- which, unless I'm forgetting a really big plotline from a past season, must be in the future. The first theory that comes to mind is that Ajira is how the Oceanic Six got back, those are their canoes, and they're the ones who were shooting at Sawyer and Co. But if that were true, why on Earth would they shoot at them? Okay, so they're too far away to see who they are. You still don't just open fire.

And why didn't the canoes disappear when the island time-shifted again? Yeah, I know: "just go with it." I'm willing to just go with it once or twice. After that, it just starts to look like it hasn't been thought out very well.

At least they gained a sense of direction: Locke decided that the best way to possibly stop the time-shifting would be to go to the Orchid, and maybe get off the island and bring the Oceanic Six back in the process. Solid plan -- if you all don't die from uncontrollable nosebleeds before then.

They must be getting affected in the order that they were each first on the island. Charlotte must've been born there, Miles must've been born there a few years later -- the theory that he's Pierre Chang's son still holds up -- and next up was Juliet. Next up is Saywer and Locke, and then finally Faraday -- unless Faraday stops pretending he has no idea what's going on and figures out a way to fix it.

By the way, where are Rose and Bernard? I totally forgot about them last week when I announced that everyone else from Oceanic 815 must be dead. They didn't get a death scene, so I'm assuming they're just hanging out somewhere.

Finally, the Jin/Rousseau reveal. I'm glad they didn't stretch it out any longer; we now know that Jin was within time-travel distance when the island disappeared, and has been hanging out on a piece of wood since then. Seeing Young Rousseau was pretty neat, though, and the fact that she's interacting with Jin might finally provide us some important answers on what kind of time travel this is: did Rousseau always rescue Jin, or is his presence changing the past?

My bet is for the former, if only because it causes less paradoxes and headaches. But it'll be interesting to see how long we stay in this time period: according to what Rousseau told Sayid way back in Season 1, two months after she was marooned, the Others -- whom she had never seen -- were carriers of a sickness that was given to her fellow shipmates, whom she was then forced to kill. (Watch this video and skip to the two minute mark.) At the time, "the Sickness" was one of the major questions of Lost, but they've back-burnered it to the point where I think I just assumed Rousseau was being crazy.

But it wouldn't make sense for the Sickness to be the time travel sickness, would it?

We're likely to get some answers next week, because the episode is called "This Place is Death" -- which, if I'm not mistaken, is a direct Rousseau quote.

Let's hope it keeps the Oceanic Six shenanigans to a minimum. I'm glad it won't take them the entire season to get back to the island.

TAGS: Aaron, Ben, Daniel Rousseau, Faraday, Jack, Jin, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, The Little Prince, The Oceanic Six, This Place Is Death
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