Doc Jensen learned two very important lessons this week. The first? Limit yourself to just one sentence per column that refers to yourself in the third person, because it’s super-annoying. The second? Perhaps I should spend less time looking outside of Lost for insight and more time looking within the show for insight. Take my recap of “Recon” from Wednesday. It’s filled with references to The Fisher King, The Book of Judges, and Jean-Paul Sartre. If I had more time, I would have larded it up further by arguing that the mythic one-eyed monster Cyclops (Homer edition) and the comic book characters Swamp Thing and Man Thing help explain UnLocke the Smoke Thing. I did the research. I really did. It’s a sickness.

Here’s what’s worse. If I had only used the time to research past Lost episodes, I would have found a reference that’s far more interesting and perhaps actually helpful for viewers to know. Because now that I have thought about it, the more “Recon” has revealed itself to be a twin to “The Other Woman,” the season 4 episode devoted to Juliet. It’s a clever association. In “Recon,” we saw Sideways James Ford (don’t call him Sawyer!) blunder his way through a doomed date with Sideways Charlotte Lewis. Fans were outraged. We had been hoping/expecting to see Sideways James live happily ever after with Sideways Juliet. How dare the show hook him up with anyone else! To our eyes, it was like watching Sawyer having a fling with… another woman. The irony: “The Other Woman” was the episode in which Lost tried to forge a romance between Jack and Juliet, giving them The Smooch That Didn’t Work. In the eyes of all who saw Kate as Jack’s true love, Juliet was “the other woman.” Indeed, a few episodes later, in “Something Nice Back Home,” Juliet herself came to that conclusion as she operated on Jack’s appendix: she correctly diagnosed Jack’s kiss as an attempt to see if he could feel for anyone else but Kate — a romantic recon mission, if you will. The answer: No. (Ironically, in retrospect, “The Other Woman” now makes Jack look like “the other man,” given how so many people feel Juliet and Sawyer belong together. Ditto Daniel Faraday: I felt he got cuckolded by Sideways Charlotte in “Recon,” poor dead twitchy egghead!)

But there are other parallels between “Recon” and “The Other Woman” that have nothing to do with romance. Consider: READ FULL STORY »