TVSquad

(S02E23) Two hour season finale. Usually that means a slow-paced episode with tons of teaser bits to keep you stringing along with a few hard-hitters near the end to keep you excited for next season. The creators of Lost must have realized that a lot of the fans of the show were feeling like we weren't getting enough answers out of the story line, so they made a jam-packed finale. It was a great episode, and I'm somewhat at a loss where to begin in writing this review.

The episode begins where last week's episode ended: all the castaways on the beach attending the funeral for Ana Lucia and Libby notice a sailboat in the distance off the beach. Sawyer, Jack, and Sayid swim out to the boat to recover the vessel and see what's going on. Once they are aboard, they are greated by gunshots being fired from below deck. They dodge the bullets, then flip up the hatch only to discover a drunken Desmond below deck, recognizing Jack, saying "You," just before we go to the title screen.

Read more including plenty of spoilers after the break...This episodes flashbacks surround Desmond (whose last name is Hume), suprisingly, and the first of them deals with him exiting Scottish military prison and his dishonorable discharge from that system. He's picked up by the father of the woman whom he loves, who reveals to him that he kept his daughter from seeing any of Desmond's letters in her incarceration. There's a lot of heavy play here on Desmond being a coward, and he's immediately cast in the star-crossed lovers' plight, where the father doesn't want him involved with the daughter. This raises our sympathy and identification with him as a character, but it also plays in to some nice twists in the episode and underscores the threaded idea that it is fate rather than some mere chance and circumstance which has brought everyone to the island.

When Desmond first reappears on the island, he's drunk and disoriented and ranting that he tried to escape on his sailboat, but that the whole island and the ocean around it are part of some large snowglobe where they are all trapped. The episode gives us the tale of Desmond recapturing his faith in the island and the need to push the button, and intertwines that story line with Eko's new blind faith in the numbers and Locke's newfound complete denial of meaning in the numbers.

Early on Locke and Eko have a confrontation where Locke tells Eko not to push the button and Eko responds, "Why wouldn't I push the button?" Locke answers, "Because you don't want to be a slave." Both Locke and Eko's stances on this issue prove to be too extreme, as Eko injures himself and Charlie later in the episode, while trying to blow the door off of the computer chamber with some dynamite to get at where Desmond and Locke are letting the timer run down. Likewise, Locke--despite Desmond's realization that the last time he failed to put in the numbers caused a magnetic distortion on September 22nd which led to Locke's plane crashing on the island--stubbornly smashed the computer on the floor, preventing Desmond from entering the numbers once he realized that it was important.

Ultimately, Desmond takes a failsafe key that he received from Kelvin (who turns out to be the American soldier who trained Sayid in torture and who Desmond accidentally kills when he discovers that Kelvin was attempting to escape the island with Desmond's repaired sailboat). Before turning it, he repeats the words from his love that he found in a letter she hid in his copy of Dicken's Our Mutual Friend. As he does this Eko walks in on Locke standing up as the entire hatch is shaking and Locke says quite simply, "I was wrong." When the key is turned, we see shots from around the island with people clasping their ears and an odd humming sound as the sky vibrates with light.

At the very end of the episode, two men in some arctic region inside a station where it is snowing outside pick up the electromagnetic field, pick up a phone, and on the other end is Desmond's love; they tell her that they found him and that's how the episode ends.

This is one crazy plot, but it's mixed in with so many other details and bits. Too many to cover in detail in this one post. I'll touch on them in brief here, as they all underscore the power of fate on the island. Desmond meets Libby in one of his flashbacks, and he tells her he plans to race around the world to defeat his love's father and win back her heart. Libby has recently lost her husband to some sort of sickness and volunteers her sailboat, the Elizabeth, named after her, for the cause. This seemed much too tenuous as the exchange was made over a simple meeting and cup of coffee. But then again, she does end up in an insane asylum.
 
Michael and the people Ms. Klugh requested he bring along go traipsing through the jungle. Along the way a strange large green bird dives at them. Was it the eagle from a dollar bill? I have no idea. Kate realizes they are being followed at one point and they end up shooting one of the Others dead. Everyone discovers what Michael did and he confesses and says he was sorry. Jack assures everyone that he has a plan.

Later they pass by a pile of the little containers that the Pearl station was sending through the tube system. A really big pile, which proves that the notes were going nowhere and that the Pearl observation experiment was another reversed observation experiment as Desmond tells Locke when he realizes that he was the cause of the plane crashing on the island. As they look at it, Sayid's signal fire appears from the beach where he, Sun, and Jin have found an abandonned camp with a hatch that is just a facade on top of rocks. Jack realizes that Michael isn't leading them to the beach camp where he said he was and all of a sudden whispers start up, darts start shooting out of the woods, and they are all captured.

They're brought to a pier where Henry Gale, who is aparantly the leader of the others shows up and gives Michael a boat and returns Walt to him, saying, "We're the good guys." He tells him to stick to one specific course and they will be rescued. They send Hugo back to the camp to tell the others they must never come to this part of the island, and Kate, Sawyer, and Jack who Gale says are "coming home with us" are covered with hoods after Jack and Kate exchange glances and Sawyer looks on jealously.

There's so much more in this episode. It was two hours of crazy information. The 108 minute pushing the button cycle released electromagnetic build up. Who knew? I'm stil a bit flabbergasted.

Oh yeah. And what's with the big statue of a foot in sandals with only four toes that Sayid, Sun, and Jin spotted from the boat?