LOST 6x09

Alright, I'm back. I apologize for the lack of content on this blog over the past couple of weeks, and I especially apologize for not reviewing last week's episode of Lost, as I know there are many of you who rely on me to tell you how to feel about this show from week to week.

I was in NYC for a couple of days last week, and I didn't catch last week's episode, "Recon", until Wednesday night. I didn't feel like putting the review up a day late, and I have been filled with a general sense of laziness lately. I'm truly sorry, I'll try not to let it happen again.

In case you're still confused about how you should feel about "Recon", I'll tell you. It was good. Cop Sawyer and Cop Miles were pretty damned awesome. As a whole, the episode was not on par with the phenomenal "Sundown" or "Dr. Linus", but it was good.

4 / 5 on the Awesome Meter.

There you go.

So, onto tonight's Richard Alpert origin story, "Ab Aeterno". I, like most of you reading this blog, have been looking forward to tonight's episode for years. Ever since the character of Richard Alpert was introduced in the third season fans have been filled with questions regarding his mysterious origins:

Why doesn't he age?
Where does he come from?
What is his connection to the Black Rock?
Is he wearing eye liner? And if so, why?

Until tonight none of these questions, with the exception of the last one, had been answered.

He is not wearing eye liner, actor Nestor Carbonell just has naturally long, ridiculously thick eyelashes.

Tonight, "Ab Aeterno", which in Spanish means "eternity", answered all of the remaining questions above, and then some.

Did the episode answer all of the questions in satisfying and conclusive ways? Mostly.

Was I pleased with the answers given? Yes, I was, for the most part.

This should go without saying by now, but I will be heading into spoiler territory so on the off chance that any of you haven't seen it yet. ::::SPOILERS:::

I had kind of been hoping that Alpert was a 4,000 year old Egyptian slave with connections to Moses. There was an ominous Moses reference made by Ben to FLocke in the season finale last year, and there is certainly some sort of tie between the island and ancient Egyptian civilization, with the abundance of hieroglyphics all over the damn place and the gargantuan statue of Tawaret that Jacob used to live underneath. I was disappointed to have my theory invalidated, though that seems to happen to me a lot in regards to Lost, so I'm pretty used to it by now.

I was also disappointed that the statue of Tawaret was destroyed by the Black Rock. I had envisioned some sort of uprising in which the statue was brought to the ground by a previous group of people on the island, as a blatant defiance of Jacob. It's a bit anticlimactic to see that it was destroyed by a ship accidentally bumping into it during a storm.

Speaking of the storm, would it really be possible for a ship to wind up on the middle of the island due to violent weather? I mean, the storm that the Black Rock was caught in did appear to be pretty epic, and the waves looked massive, but unless I'm mistaken (and I'm not) the ship winds up pretty far inland.

I enjoyed the revelation that Richard, despite his 130 or so years on the island, appears to know very little. It was a similar revelation with Ben Linus, where we have a character that the audience is led to assume knows all kinds of secrets, only to learn that the secrets that they do know are barely scratching the proverbial surface.

What else did we learn this week? That the island's true purpose is to act as a "cork" that keeps pure evil from escaping and spreading throughout the world, presumably infecting everyone on Earth as it has done to Sayid and Claire. That's pretty awesome, I guess. It's certainly setting up some very high stakes.

So I guess this means that the Island is a bit like Pandora's Box, and the Man in Black/Flocke is the embodiment of all evil?

There's only nine hours left to go, which means that we're exactly half-way through the season, and it seems like we still have so much to learn. Tonight's hour did a great job of filling in some gaps, even if I wasn't one-hundred percent satisfied with the answers.

4.5 / 5 on the Awesome Meter