Cafe Locke: Grenades for Breakfast
Last night, yet again, the show totally Scooby Doo’d us. Kate wasn’t pregnant with Sawyer’s baby, but in off-island life she is playing mommy to Aaron, Claire’s son. Is Claire still on the island after the rescue of the Oceanic Six, or did she meet with an unfortunate end? Hit us with your comments about what happened to Claire, and what that ghostbuster Miles is up to.
Any episode of Lost that starts with an extreme close-up of a person’s eye is a sign that person is in big trouble. Such was the case with Locke. In several ways, he’s become Ben: he is losing touch with the forces of the island, his team is questioning him, and he’s acting irrationally.
Locke hands Ben a book he’s already read, Philip K. Dick’s Valis. In a wink to the audience’s extreme scrutiny of the show, Locke tells him to read it again, because the second time around he might catch something he missed. Locke appeals to Ben for information on Miles, and Ben continues to mess with his head, chiding him for hitting dead ends. Locke tries to shrug it off, and Ben exclaims, “Excellent, John! You’re evolving.” But what kind of change is taking place? Is John evolving to the point where power corrupts him, as it may have done with Ben?
Hurley is tricked into revealing where Miles is being held. Kate makes her way to him only to find that he wants to speak to Ben. Sawyer was reading a novel and Hurley had just popped Xanadu into the VCR when Kate arrived to ask for Sawyer’s help. (Oddly, in the preview clips earlier this week, the videotape that Hurley put in was Satan’s Doom with a Metallica track blaring, not Xanadu with Olivia Newton-John, as aired last night.)
Geek Alert: The book Sawyer was reading was The Invention of Morel, in which a fugitive on a deserted island encounters a group of tourists who don’t acknowledge his presence. He realizes they exist as film-like images captured in an invention that attempts to reproduce reality and provide immortality for those filmed.
Sawyer visits Locke and they play backgammon. Sawyer takes the white pieces, Locke the black. Good vs. evil symbols anyone? Perhaps this is a further sign of Locke’s fizzling connection to the island. Kate manages to break into Locke’s house with Miles and brings him to Ben. What did Miles want from him? Answers? A Psychic Friends reading? A guided tour of the island? Nope. He wants $3.2 million to tell the people he works for that Ben is dead. Is Miles just blackmailing him, or is it coded speech to Ben? Or could it possibly Miles and the freighter people know Ben would have to leave the island to get that much scratch, providing them with their only actual chance to capture him?
Elsewhere on the island, Daniel Faraday and Charlotte are playing a memory card game, and Daniel is struggling to recall the three cards. Does Daniel have no short-term memory? Could this be why he couldn’t answer why he’d been crying at the recovery news reports, or why he wasn’t able to explain the hazmat suits and gas masks on the chopper? Maybe he’s just practicing ESP with Charlotte. Juliet and Jack convince them to call back to the freighter on another line, and they learn that the helicopter that left a day and a half ago hasn’t made it back to the ship. Daniel warned Frank to follow the exact same bearings that got him there. Guess he didn’t heed that advice.
John visits Miles, now held much more securely at the boathouse. Locke puts a live grenade in Miles’ mouth and leaves him there to think about the answers to who they are and what they’re doing there. In one of the most evil lines ever delivered on the show, he says to Miles, “Enjoy your breakfast.”
In the flash-forward, we see Kate’s courtroom trial. Jack is a surprise witness for the defense, and we learn the lie they’ve all been forced to tell: Only eight people survived the initial crash and Kate helped get them all to the shore of an island where they nearly starved to death. Kate’s given probation thanks to her mother’s refusal to testify against her. Jack meets her outside the courthouse, but says he can’t go with her because he doesn’t want to see her son. The assumption that it’s Sawyer’s son is shattered when they dropped the bomb on us that it was Aaron. Told ya: totally Scooby Doo’d!
-Sean Salo
