Have these episodes made you feel anything? I think they caved to the we want facts, we want to know how french guy lost his arm crowd. As the writers tried to explain..thats boring. THEMES are the key to lost and so far they have not been clever enough to weave a single interesting theme that ties in both parties.

They also made a huge mistake having only Sawyer and Jules featured on the island. This “our friends need help” plot is carries no weight because of this. If Hurley, Kate and charlie were there and sawyer was home it would make for a fantastic dyanamic–with Jack and sawyer both trying to get to Kate. If they included Jin from the start, kept Claire in the mix, and made Rose and Hubby regulars it would have more emotion to save their friends.

Being a writing buff this is real poor stuff. Its almost like a clip show. But I have faith that they will correct this. It was an interesting attempt at creating live flashbacks but they never found a way of weaving a coherent theme into both groups. Its just basically a play by play of events with no underlying symbolism.

Im sure a certain segment of viewers love it but its poor writing and poor execution. I have feeling the next 2 epi’s will make up for it though–and I completely disagree with the notion that this will all be worth it or make sense when we see what follows it—People, thats not why people watch series–movies maybe–but each week, each scene has to be rich. It must stand on its own.

We also haven’t seen what finally soured Sayid on killing for Ben enough to make him quit. We haven’t seen nearly enough of Sun’s cahootzing with Widmore. We saw way too little of Hurley’s slide into madness.

It really makes their off-Island time feel rather perfunctory after the initial “holy shit!” of seeing that they both got off the Island and have had a bad time of it since.

Also, I feel at least a little let down that it certainly looks like Locke never gets to spend time as leader of the Others, actually getting some real Island Secrets™ under his belt before becoming Jeremy Bentham and dying. :-/

The only actual issue I’m taking with the show is the dialogue of reveals. They are a little hammer over the head. “Put the gun down… WIDMORE.” Alpert’s cadence bothered me. It’s almost like he knew we knew Locke knew. Too winky winky. Or… “My name is Danielle…” pause pause move hair… “Danielle Rousseau”. But the Jin reveal was very, very good.

I think we’ve seen wonderful development, some epiphinies with the characters despite separation. Locke’s statement to Sawyer about the light and Sawyer’s own to Juliet. Jack’s decision to return to the island (which will be revealed more as a result of what Bentham told Jack rather than Ben’s manipulations) and Sayid’s awareness of Ben’s evilness.

We have yet to see Kate’s big change, or Hurley’s. And of course there are many more characters yet to evolve. But if nothing else this season as been a well-spring compared to past seasons.

Sometimes separation can be a good thing. Gives us time to self-reflect.