Tom Reviews Lost: Season 1 Episode 6 "House of the Rising Sun"
It's Day 7 on the island, and we finally get to learn more about our favorite Asian couple. For one thing, it appears they're Korean, which was probably obvious, but I don't like to assume, (see back when I thought Sayid was Indian.)
So what did we learn about Jin and Sun? (Yes, I looked up Jin's name since he was the only character whose name I hadn't caught yet.) Well it appears that Sun comes from money, while Jin doesn't. And it appears that they truly were in love at one point, and I suppose one of the biggest parts of their story will be to see whether they're still in love. It appears that Sun just wanted to elope to America, but Jin felt uncomfortable with that and wanted her father's blessing. I guess he's a traditionalist that way. He got it, but it came at a cost, as he was forced to work for Sun's father, who seemingly is some type of crime boss. Prior to the plane crash it had appeared that Sun had fallen out of love with Jin and was considering leaving him, but some glimmer of his former self stopped her.
I guess this backstory explains the tension between Jin and Sun that has permeated throughout the season so far. I wish it explained why Jin went off on Michael. The whole episode, I thought there was going to be some great reveal in the flashback that explained the attack, but no it was just over a watch I don't even remember seeing until the end of the episode. Lame. It was fun to learn that Sun can speak English, although it sort of undercuts the whole theme of trying to communicate without a common language I thought the writers were going for. I wonder if Sun knowing English was the plan all along, or whether the writers just got tired of them not being able to communicate with the rest of the survivors. I guess we'll see where it goes from here. I'm going to predict right now that Jin can also speak English, and he just refuses to out of cultural pride.
Michael with an ax was cool. I like that the writers brought up some racial tension, only to have Michael to downplay it to his son to try and teach him a better way. Obviously we're going to find out more about Michael's backstory with Walt's mom; I hope the writers chose to do something interesting with that.
I love Locke's shamanistic nature, and I'm glad Charlie has lost his drugs. Hopefully he plays some awesome songs on his guitar.
Jack and Kate are conscious of their flirting in this episode. I laughed out loud when somehow the threat of bees lead to them randomly taking off their shirts. That didn't seem forced at all, writers...
Kate has clearly watched her Teen Dramas closely and has learned that now is the perfect time for her to suddenly pull back from her attraction from Jack. Since we don't know her full backstory, I have no idea if this makes any sense for Kate's character, but it's a fairly classic angst move.
My favorite part of this episode was the split of the survivors into two camps. Jack leads the realists in setting up camp near the water supply, while Sayid leads the optimists in mainlining the signal fire on the beach. I was interested to see which survivors went where, and I'm really excited to see the dynamic between the two camps. Jack and Sayid's rivalry is interesting to see, although I don't know if I agree with Sawyer's assessment that this is some sort of sexual rivalry over Kate. I think Sayid's optimism is an interesting aspect of his character, and he has already stepped into a leadership role before this. Up until now, Jack and Sayid have sort of taken turns leading, but this would have lead to problems eventually. I wonder if at any point the two camps will compete against each other in some way. I'm not sure how that would work, but it would be fun to see. I'm still hoping to see more about Sayid's past though, especially now that he's the chief of the Beach Tribe.
The biggest mystery of this episode for me was Sawyer. He didn't strike me as an optimist, so his choice to stay seemed odd. Did he stay with the Beach Tribe for Kate? I hope not. I'm rooting for him to hook up with Shannon, to create the ship of apathy! Other than Sayid, he's probably the person I'm most curious to find out more about.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10 guitars found up in a tree.
I disliked that the whole Jin attacking Michael plot ended up having no real point. For a while there I thought the backstory would reveal something about Michael stealing Vincent the dog or something that would be interesting. It wasn't. Michael just found Jin's watch. Ugh.
Everything else about this episode was really good. I enjoy the survivors splitting into two separate camps, and I think that there's a lot of good plots that can spin out of this. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next on the island!
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