Sawyer Is Right About Jack, After All (Spoilers in this article if you haven't seen the latest episode of Lost.)

By Charlie Jane Anders

Watching last night's Lost, I realized for the first time just how much I love this new version of Sawyer. I'd way rather follow him than Jack or Locke. Spoilers and snark ahead.

First of all, I have to apologize for the lack of a Lynn Peril recap this week. She's traveling, so I'm stepping in as your Lost recapper for once. I don't quite have Lynn's encyclopedic Lost knowledge, so you'll have to bear with me if I get something wrong.

So the scene I posted above, featuring Jack and Sawyer, really crystalized something about both those characters for me. Jack spends the whole episode, in "Namaste," visibly sulking because he's not the center of attention. He's scandalized that someone with his medical training and amazing leadership skills has been assigned to workman duty. He's annoyed that Sawyer is in charge and knows more than he does.

I think Jack expected to come back to the island and be greeted as a savior, possibly with some kind of chorus line. He'd gotten it in his head, after everything Locke told him, that his return was needed to save everybody, and it played into his giant messiah complex. (Although, since Jack's dad appears to be God, maybe he's not that far off. Just kidding. I think.) Instead, Jack gets back, and all he is, for now, is a great big complication in Sawyer's orderly life.

On the other hand, if Sawyer is the guy who figures out all the angles and knows how to make everything work, what exactly is he planning to do about the giant massacre on the horizon? Okay, sure, he has a few years left before everybody in the Dharma Initiative gets eradicated. But Sawyer's bought into Faraday's theory that you can't change history unless your name is Desmond. So does Sawyer have some kind of escape route planned?

The character I felt really bad for last night was actually Juliet. She's hosed, she knows she's hosed, and she just holds it together. The fact that Sawyer didn't tell her Jack and Kate were back, and the way Sawyer looks at Kate, pretty much seal her fate. Unlike my colleague Meredith, I've actually gotten to like Juliet a lot recently, and I think she's one of the most heroic characters on the show because she does what she has to, without being a drama queen (or even a Dharma queen) about it. She's actually really perfect for this new version of Sawyer, who takes responsibility and thinks things through. But apparently the show's producers think we're only interested in the boring old Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle - I'm one of those who think Jack and Kate deserve each other. Yes, I'm a Jeweler.

Other random stuff:

Hurley, as usual, gets the best line of the night, where he's like, "What if they ask us who's president in 1977?"

How many times can Ben get hit in the head before he starts using Yoda grammar or having a weird twitch?

Frank's right that it's silly to whack Ben in the head but then take Ben's advice. And Ben's right that Frank should have stayed with his passengers. Speaking of which, now that nobody we care about is among those airline passengers, are we going to see them again?

Where the heck is Locke? (Update: Several commenters have pointed out this episode takes place before Locke comes back from the dead at the end of "Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham.")

And did I miss the explanation of what happened to Faraday? I'm guessing it has to do with his freakout around young Charlotte.

This is the first time we've seen Pierre Chang/Marvin Candle since the season opener, right? What's he been up to all this time? When are we going to see more of the chaos at the Orchid Station that we glimpsed in that opening episode? (And which apparently involved Daniel?)

So what did you guys think?