Episode Report Card Dan Kwa: B | 139 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT That Girl From Pyongyang (Unfurled My Long Wang)
By Dan Kwa | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 2004.10.27
Sawyer approaches Kate, who's sitting on Broody Beach. Two patented Sawyer nicknames and some space-filling banter later, we establish that neither one of them wants to tell the other whether they're heading for the caves or staying on the beach.
Mercutio's chopping wood when Sun approaches him. Before she speaks, we get another flashback to Koreastralia. A short-haired Sun speaks with an interior designer while Jin looks on; they seem to be redecorating their apartment. They move to another room to keep from bothering Jin, who's on the phone. In the bedroom, the designer quietly asks Sun if she's ready and if she has been taking her lessons. Knitting lessons? How nice! I always wanted to learn how to knit. "Do you realize that your husband and your father will do everything they can to find you?" she asks. Huh? I wish some explanation was given for why, exactly, Sun just can't get a divorce like millions of people around the world. Maybe divorce is illegal in Koreastralia. The designer gives Sun an envelope full of what appear to be fake passports and tells her to walk out of the airport at 11:15. This just gets weirder and weirder. Why does she need new ID? Is her father going to kill her? Why? And unfortunately, it doesn't seem weird the way, say, Locke's story seems weird, where we feel it's a glorious mystery that the writers are intentionally leaving open-ended. It seems weird in a way that suggests the writers think we should understand what's going on here, but failed to write these scenes clearly enough to make it apparent. The designer tells Sun that at first her family will believe she has been kidnapped; after a week or so, she is free to move wherever she wants. Sun repeats the time she is supposed to sneak away: "11:15, 11:15, 11:15."
Sun watches Mercutio chop wood, then steps out of the bamboo grove. "I need to talk to you," she says in English, helped by her apparently fantastic knitting lessons. "You speak English?" a Mercutio asks in disbelief. "Why didn't you say anything?" Sun says that her husband doesn't know she speaks English. "What my husband did to you -- it was a misunderstanding," she says, employing a complicated syntax that no non-native English speaker who just finished English lessons would ever use. She explains that Jin attacked him because the watch Mercutio found two days ago and is wearing now belongs to her father. That raises the interesting question: was Sun's father on the plane? Why else would that watch be there? Sun says, "Protecting that watch is a question of honor." Again, why the tortured syntax? I took five years of French and I could barely construct that sentence en français. In fact, I would never try. I would say, "My husband honors the watch," or something half-assed like that. Sun must've been a hell of a knitting student. Sun says she needs Mercutio's help.