LOST: The Last Recruit - Take a leap of faith

Sun and Jin are finally reunited, and it feels so good. Zoe makes an explosive entrance. Jack doesn’t know how to dive. UnLocke has a dressing up as dead people fetish. Claire starts hanging with the popular kids. Sawyer tells Jack to walk the plank. The 815ers fill up a few more hospital beds. And who the hell’s Anakin?

Lost 6x13: The Last Recruit

This episode moved very quickly and I think they crammed a lot into it: new answers, explosions, reunions, allegiances, and captivity. Rather than the methodical pace of LOST, this felt more like a bit of a sprint to the end. Definitely seems the theory that the sidewayers are all assembling – by choice or otherwise – at the hospital is coming to be. So where to they go from here?

Thoughts? Comments? Leave them below.


2007, On the island:
“Hello Jack. I was hoping you’d come. I think we have some catching up to do.” UnLocke is so…rational and almost polite. It’s hard to fathom that he’s this pure evil everyone’s been warned about. Jack asks why Smokey chose Locke, and he answers, “because he was stupid enough to believe that he’d been brought here for a reason, because he pursued that belief until it got him killed, and because you were kind enough to bring his body back here in a nice wooden box.” UnLocke owns up to taking the appearance of Christian, but claims everything he’d done was to help him get off the island.

Question: So Smokey was every apparition? Harper the therapist? Dave? Kate's horse? Yemi, Eko's brother? Tall Walt?

Explaining that they all need to leave together, UnLocke becomes frustrated when Jack questions this, stating that Locke believed in the island. But UnLocke dismisses the former ‘renter’ in the body he now occupies as a sucker.

UnLocke hears someone in the jungle and calls out for the hiding Claire. She says Jack’s her brother, and UnLocke leaves them to talk. She asks if he fessed up about posing as Christian, and says she gave up hope he’d ever come back, but says she’s happy to see him again. Claire tells him that the moment he talked to UnLocke, he was with him, like it or not.

Nerd alert: Claire touched Jack when they were talking. Is this another moment of touching having some significance, as with UnLocke’s hand grabbing?

Sawyer is explaining the plan to take Widmore’s sub off the island to Hurley, including why he’s not including Sayid in the plan. Hurley reminds him that people can be brought back from the dark side…like Anakin. UnLocke returns to camp, announcing, “It’s so nice to have everybody together again.”


Nerd alert: When Jack and UnLocke walk into the jungle to catch up, it’s pitch black out. When they return, it’s bright and sunny.

Confiding in Jack, Kate says about Sayid, “he’s different now.” Jack’s thoughtful reply, “I guess we’re all different now.” (Did that feel a little earnest, like from some high school performance of “Our Town”?) Zoe comes charging into the UnLocke Flock camp asking to see the man in charge. She demands what he’s stolen from them – Desmond – back. She radios to her people and suddenly a missle flies in and explodes just a few yards from them. She hands UnLocke a walkie talkie and tells him to call when he’s ready for them to pick Desmond up. UnLocke uses his wooden staff to smash the walkie.


Nerd alert: We’ve learned that Smokey is afraid of technology in the past, going back to our first encounter with him in what we thought was Jacob’s cabin. (Can we assume Jacob has a similar distrust of technology?)

Jacob’s prepping the team for the journey, and asks Sawyer to use the sailboat to get to the Hydra Island. Sawyer asks Kate to come along. UnLocke pulls Sayid aside to talk, and Sawyer does the same with Jack, filling him in on the plot to steal the sub. He says that they are not taking Sayid or Claire, because he’s a zombie and she’s gone crazy. UnLocke tells Sayid that he has to kill Desmond if he wants to see Nadia again.

At the well, Desmond knows Sayid is there to kill him and asks him what he offered him to kill him. Desmond asks where Nadia is now, and asks how he knows UnLocke can bring her back. He answers that UnLocke brought him back. But Desmond questions what Sayid will tell her when she asks what Sayid did to be with her again. And under that zombie exterior, beat human heart as (we assume) he didn’t kill Desmond.


On the beach, Sawyer reveals his plan to Kate and the deal he cut with Widmore, and Kate is furious that Claire isn’t part of the plan. But Sawyer explains Claire’s too far gone. The two of them swim out to the sailboat.

Jack asks Claire why she’s with UnLocke, and her reply is that he was the only one who didn’t abandon her. UnLocke falls back, and Jack, Hurley, Sun and Lapidus make for the dock in a map Sawyer gave him.

Running into Sayid in the jungle, UnLocke asks if Desmond is dead. Sayid tells him to go and check. (Really, if it’s that important that he’s dead, shouldn’t UnLocke have gone all Smokey to go see for himself?) They walk off to get to the plane.

Jack’s team arrive at the dock where Sawyer and Kate are now docked. Claire shows up almost immediately behind them and Kate tires to talk her down off the ledge by offering her a slot on the plane so she can rescue and raise Aaron. Kate apologizes and convinces Claire to come along with them.

On the sailboat, Sawyer goes to Jack to talk with him in private, but Jack explains that it doesn’t feel right to leave the island. He believes that they were brought there to do something special, and Sawyer demands he either come around or get off the boat. Jack does a dainty little jump into the waves below to swim back to the main island and UnLocke. Kate tells Sawyer that they have to go back to get him. He replies, “We’re done going back, Kate.”


Jack swims up onto the beach by the still-patient UnLocke. And Sawyer’s crew swim up onto the beach at the Hydra Island and are met with a welcome party of guns. Zoe recognizes Sawyer and radios to Widmore. And just then – finally – Jin walks onto the beach, and he and Sun are reunited. Sun can suddenly speak English again, and for some strange reason, they have a full conversation in English instead of Korean.


Widmore gives Zoe the order to capture all of them, and Zoe orders the first missile, which explodes on the beach, sending Jack flying and causing him to lose his hearing. UnLocke picks him up on his shoulders and carries Jack to safety, saying, “It’s going to be alright. You’re with me now.”

Question: Is it possible Jack died and was touched by UnLocke, therefore infecting him?





2004, Los Angeles:
In an ambulance on the way to the hospital, Ben is riding along with Locke. Ben reassures him. As the gurney is being wheeled into the hospital, Sun’s gurney is being wheeled alongside his, and she wigs out at seeing John.

Question: The island has bled further into the sideways reality here, with Sun acknowledging that Locke (or rather UnLocke) is someone she should fear.


Det. James Ford offers Kate an apple and reads the list of charges, but Kate denies she did wrong. He asks if she thinks it’s weird that they were on the same flight and she ran into his car. She speculates though that he didn’t arrest her because he didn’t want anyone to know he was in Australia.
Question: Is the apple a reference to Eve’s apple?


Miles comes in with a new case – the Keamy crew murdered at the restaurant and Sun shot. Miles has the ATM surveillance tape which shows Sayid as the shooter.


Claire arrives in the lobby of an office building to meet with the Western Pacific Adoption Agency. Desmond arrives at the same moment to see a lawyer and recognizes her from baggage claim. (What a coincidence! They’re both on the 15th floor.) He coerces her to see his lawyer to discuss the adoption. Ilana walks out of her office and is shocked to see Claire in her lobby. Ilana tells Claire that they’ve been looking for her.

Nerd alert: Law firm is Sweetzer & Verdansky. And we now know Ilana’s last name is Verdansky. The coffee shop Penny told Desmond they'd meet on was on Sweetzer & Melrose, but I'm not seeing a connection. And while there's not a Verdansky connection I've found, there is a Vladimir Vernadsky who was "a Russian and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and of radiogeology. His ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to Russian cosmism." Or that could just be another coincidence.


Question: Desmond was there exclusively to drive her into Ilana’s hands, right? He's like Mrs. Hawking now, trying to steer people toward their destiny, it seems, even if by force.

At Nadia’s house, Sayid bursts in to pack and flee. Miles rings the bell and Sayid runs out the back, but he’s apparently no match for a garden hose and Ford, who trips and then cuffs him.

Question: They i.d.’d Sayid from an ATM photo and found him that quickly? Really?


At the same office building, Jack and his son David arrive, and suddenly, David is overly concerned for his father’s happiness. (Did it seem to anyone else like too quick a transformation in their relationship?) Ilana escorts them into a conference room where Claire is sitting and waiting. She explains to Jack that Christian was her father too, and Jack gets an emergency call from the hospital to come operate on Locke’s spine.

Sun wakes up, and Jin tells her that despite the gunshot wound to her abdomen, that the baby is fine. Jack and David are passing Sun’s room on their way to the procedure that he has to perform – surgery on John Locke. Jack looks at the x-rays of John Locke and realizes it’s his Dural sac that’s been “obliterated”. He realizes that it’s John Locke on the operationg table.

Nerd alert: The injury Jack inflicted on his future wife, Sarah, when she was in for surgery was to her dural sac.

Nerd alert: Jack has another mirror moment in this episode, staring at the mirror under John Locke's face.


Drop some comments below. Next week's ep is a repeat, by the way. (Kind of looking forward to a break, actually...)

-Sean Salo