Follow along! The episode guide for “There’s No Place Like Home, Part 1” is in Finding Lost — Season 4, pp. 159-170.The beginning of the three-part ender, where we see what really happened when the Oceanic 6 first returned to civilization. So much to love in this episode!
Fun things I noticed:
• I ♥♥♥ Carmen Reyes. That scene of her running to hug Hurley and then Sayid is just… sigh. I ♥ her.
• This episode once again raised the question about Sayid’s parents: Are they dead? Or are they just hard-hearted? Kate seems completely alone at the airport, while Sayid is enveloped by the Reyes family, but no one shows up for him, either. We know what a hard person his father was, but what about his mother?
• Does anyone else find it strange that Juliet knew all about the Looking-Glass station – even though Mikhail and everyone else were surprised to discover it existed – but she didn’t know about the Orchid? Maybe it’s the toppermost of the top-secret places on the island.
• Sawyer: “You don’t get to die alone.” That still makes me laugh out loud.
• There’s a LOT more on the DVD than was shown in the original TV version of the episode: we see new questions from the reporters, Sayid is asked a question, Jack’s father is brought up by another one. I’m surprised in all the extra footage there’s no reaction shot of Sun’s parents when she leans forward and speaks English for the first time. You’d think they both would have fallen out of their chairs in shock.
• Why didn’t a doctor ever notice that Sun had conceived the baby post-crash? An ultrasound can usually figure out the date of conception to the exact day, give or take a day or two. You don’t think they would have noticed that the baby had been conceived a month and a half AFTER her husband had supposedly died?
• I still remember being on the edge of my seat in that final week between this ep and the finale: we know the O6 will be leaving together, yet at the end of this episode Kate and Sayid are with the Others, Hurley’s with Locke, Sun and Aaron are on the freighter with Desmond, Jack is with Sawyer, and Ben has been taken by Keamy. How will they EVER get back together to get off the island?! ;)
Things that have new meaning:
• I love the disgust with which Ben tells Hurley those crackers are 15 years old. In light of S5, those crackers are still a mystery. Is it possible they’re actually not old at all, but somehow time-jumped? Wouldn’t you love it if at the beginning of S6 they’re all back in 2007 and Miles says to Hurley, “You’re the one who wanted to rewrite Empire” and Hurley says, “Dude, that was THIRTY YEARS AGO. Let it go.”
• Who could Ben have been communicating with? Jacob doesn’t seem to be an option anymore in light of S5. Could it have been Richard? Someone suggested on my site that he could have been communicating with an earlier version of himself (and then when I posted that suggestion over on DocArzt, I was told that was one of the stupidest things ever suggested in the Lostverse… but I’m not sure it should be dismissed so summarily).
• There’s Alpert in ratty clothes again! I forgot we saw him dressed like that in this episode. By S5, he’s completely well put-together (always in a dress shirt with the sleeves up) but here he’s not. In case you weren’t watching Lost at the time, the reason Alpert suddenly begins showing up at the end of S4 rather than being a large part of the entire season is because he’d moved over to another series, Cane, which was on CBS, and CBS refused to let him do guest spots for ABC. Then Cane was cancelled and he was free to come back. Whew.
• What if the Temple allows you to see the future? Is it possible that when Ben was taken there and “lost his innocence” as a boy, that it allowed him to see across time, and so that’s how he always knows what’s going to happen? That’s why Alex’s death might have been a surprise to him (it wasn’t in what he’d seen) and why he could march right up to Keamy and know he’ll be just fine.
