Monsters of Television

“Jin is waiting.”

“Sun, wait!”

Better late than never.

That phrase could be applied to both my super timely review of the most recent Lost and the episode itself. It’s been 19 episodes since Sun and Jin last had a centric episode. It’s been longer for some characters (Hurley is at 22, Desmond at 21) but I make mention of this gap because the show, unlike with Hurley or Desmond, continues to makes us aware of the fact that Sun and Jin have been separated for what seems like an eternity (for the audience, anyway) and that their roles in the final stretch of the show has been significantly smaller than many other characters.

I’ve always liked Sun and Jin as characters and felt with both Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim had immense amounts of chemistry with one another and with the rest of the cast (an especially good thing for Daniel Dae Kim since he wasn’t speaking the same language as everyone else for seasons and still managed to click with everyone in the ensemble). I always found their episodes to be engaging and romantic without being sappy. They were the couple I rooted for instead of that Jack-Kate-Sawyer silliness (before Desmond and Penny, but how can you not root for Desmond and Penny?).

This is different from Hurley and Desmond. Hurley, despite not having a centric episode in a while, has never really been in the background. He moves the narrative along, whether it be through his own devices or acting as Jacob’s spokesman. As a result, Hurley is present and engaged with the narrative force of the show. He’s important, and despite not having a centric episode, we know and can feel that.

Desmond, on the other hand, has been absent since “The Variable” (S5Ep14) but not in such a way that I’ve really noticed. Yes, he appeared briefly in this season’s premiere, but the show hasn’t called attention to his absence. His name has hardly been mentioned, and his role in this final stretch of the narrative is only just now beginning (there was zero doubt in anyone’s mind that Desmond was “the package” that Widmore was keeping on the sub). His lack of a role isn’t as obvious as Sun and Jin’s simply because he hasn’t been on screen for us to notice that he’s not an active participant in the narrative.

So it’s been much to my dismay that Sun and Jin have been kept apart for much of the last two seasons. While it has served to give them a narrative drive (to find one another), the show hasn’t seem overly invested in letting them act on it. Instead, narrative occurs around them and to them, with their senses of agency nearly non-existent. And any time they decide to exercise agency, they get shot at, caught in a bear trap, or bonked on the head by a tree branch. As a result, they end up hanging out in the background, waiting for someone with more narrative importance to tell them to move along.

As Nick pointed out, the Kwons end up standing in as thematic devices as opposed to characters: love able to cross time and space in unstoppable ways. The issue with this use of the Kwons is that a) the show doesn’t seem all that interested in letting them do anything to build on that theme, and b) we’ve already seen this theme play out with Desmond and Penny, with significantly more emotional (and narrative) urgency. As much as I like Sun and Jin, I just don’t care about them any more.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Despite my complaints, the episode earned some points, but largely on the backs of other dependable characters, like Keamy and Mikhail in the flash-sideways (dude lost his eye!) and Ben, Miles, and Lapidus on the Island.
• To that end, Miles commenting on the aphasia that Sun suffered from, while amusing, is still lame. I’m willing to buy into smoke monsters, polar bears, and people talking to ghosts, but forgetting how to speak English? Lazy.
• I didn’t watch the show live, so I didn’t have to suffer through the V clock like many others did. Perhaps the outrage over the clock made the faults in the episode less noticeable for those watching it then (or perhaps it just made them worse?)